The majority of responsible fleet managers and business owners understand the core imperative to make sure their business drivers are legal and safe on the road – and this starts with the basic essential practice of driver licence checking. It can be an onerous task, especially with larger fleet and driver numbers, but one that will underwrite your insurance risks, and ensure that your drivers are legal and authorised to drive the type of vehicle you expect them to drive for work.
As part of their comprehensive range of driver risk management and driver training services, DriveTech’s experience in licence checking indicates that 1 in 650 drivers checked are driving while disqualified, and 1 in 300 have a revoked or expiring licence. And additionally, 1 in 16 drivers will have an expired or expiring photocard licence.
Businesses cannot leave this to chance therefore – the risks to your business in costs and reputation can be potentially enormous. This essential process is a must-have for businesses, but one which has necessarily been quite traditionally paper-based and therefore slow and more cumbersome than needs be.
DriveTech are delighted to announce that they are shortly to release their new electronic checking service, e-Check – where each business driver will be invited to complete a simple online form, including notably an e-signature – negating the need for an enormous and more time-consuming hard copy “ink” signature requirement and subsequent ‘paper-chase’. Once this permission has been granted by the individual driver for us to perform a licence check, we conduct the check with the DVLA (or DVA in Northern Ireland) and report this back to the employer (and individual driver) – all via our online FleetRiskManager portal which provides business managers with a “live view” to help maintain a simple overview of which drivers in their fleet are eligible to drive, what risks individuals might pose (such as high levels of penalty points), and what licence status exists at any time (to anticipate, for example, expiring photocards).
Included in Drivetech’s e-Check benefits are:
- it can be completed by UK and non-UK licence holders
- that data capture requirements are minimal, just two components – a name and an email address
- that managers can easily facilitate their drivers completing the process
This system has been validated and is formally approved by the DVLA and GDPR compliant.
Commenting on this exciting development, Colin Paterson (Head of Marketing at DriveTech) commented:
“We have invested a lot of development time and energy to develop our e-Check system to be a reliable, tested, licencing authority-approved system that can really help streamline this essential but often time-consuming process for responsible employers.
We are really encouraged at the interest our customers have already shown during our early soft launch of the product over the last month and look forward to fully launching this new system in later June. It will of course go on to help employers determine which drivers in their fleet might benefit further from driver training support or interventions to help improve overall road safety and improve the business’s risk profile.”
To find out more visit the drivetech.co.uk website News section, email DriveTech on tellmemore@drivetech.co.uk, or get in touch with your normal DriveTech account manager.
