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Driver duty of care: what the law expects of employers

Published

If someone drives for your business — daily in a liveried van or once a month in their own car to a meeting — you owe a duty of care for that driving, and "they showed me a licence when we hired them" has never once satisfied it.

Where the duty comes from

Three pieces of law do the work:

  • Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 — employers must ensure, so far as reasonably practicable, the safety of employees and the public. HSE and the courts treat work-related road journeys as workplace activity: the vehicle is a workplace.
  • Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 — requires risk assessment of work activities, driving included, and competent arrangements to manage the risk.
  • Road Traffic Act 1988 — makes it an offence not just to drive without entitlement or insurance, but to cause or permit another person to do so. That is the provision that reaches the transport manager and the company, not just the driver.

Behind them sits the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 for the worst outcomes, and HSE's guidance Driving and riding safely for work, which is what an investigator will benchmark your arrangements against.

What the duty means in practice

Courts and coroners ask a simple question after a serious incident: what system did the employer have, and was it followed? For licence checking, a defensible system means:

  1. Check before the first work journey — the actual DVLA record (not the photocard, which hasn't shown points since the paper counterpart was abolished in 2015).
  2. Match entitlement to vehicle — the right categories, full not provisional, watching the 1997 grandfather-rights line for minibuses and 7.5-tonners.
  3. Re-check on a risk-based schedule — more often as points build, because revocations and bans arrive between annual checks.
  4. Keep the evidence — driver consent, check dates, what DVLA returned, and what you did when a check raised a flag.
  5. Act on findings — a recorded "fail" with the driver kept on the road is worse than no system at all.

Grey-fleet drivers are not exempt

The duty covers anyone driving for work, including employees using their own cars ("grey fleet") and agency drivers. Commuting is generally out of scope; driving between sites, to clients, or on errands is in. For grey fleet, insurance for business use belongs on the same checklist as the licence.

The evidence trail is the point

Duty of care is discharged by systems, applied, with records — not by good intentions. If your licence checks live in a spreadsheet updated when someone remembers, the gap between policy and practice is exactly what a claimant's solicitor will find. Automated checking exists to close that gap: consent captured once, checks running on schedule, verdicts and history kept where an audit can see them.