Compliance Catch-Up – What the DVSA aren’t telling us and what you need to know!

You, the conscientious operator, are chugging along quite nicely indeed, thank you very much. You download your tacho heads on time, you get your maintenance inspections correctly completed (and on time) and, blimey, you even have laden brake tests with every inspection. Not to mention the fact that you are a fully paid-up member of a trade association, attend industry events and get the Moving On Blog fired into your inbox at infrequent intervals.

There should, of course, be no need to worry when your maintenance provider returns your commercial vehicle to you saying, “We got it through, but they were a bit funny down at the station, and I had to make adjustments on it first time, but it passed eventually” – all delivered with a fully satisfied smile and an invoice in hand. What said maintenance provider might not be telling you is this: “We didn’t retorque the wheel nuts between our place and the test lane, they were loose and you got an S-marked prohibition.”

“Either way,” you think, safe in the knowledge that you have everything right at your end, “we are all square, DVSA won’t be interested in us – we have Green OCRS and everything.”

However,…

This S-marked prohibition lands on the desk of a plucky DVSA Officer (I don’t think this is actually how it works, but allow me some poetic licence) and they seize their opportunity to pounce. DVSA Enforcement unexpectedly turn up, but you are ready for the fight. Equipped with your recently downloaded copy of the Guide to Maintaining Roadworthiness, you can play a straight bat to every question they could throw at you.

And you are, you are able to give maintenance records dating back 15 months, retorque tags, laden brake test records, defect reports and every Driver CPC certificate since 2009. You cordially shake hands with the Enforcement Agent and are told that you will hear back from them.

Minutes, hours, days, weeks, months (I genuinely had a six-month wait once) elapse and then it lands. The fabled MIVR, and its front cover is specked with Green, Yellow, Amber and (heaven forbid) Red.

“Amber!” you proclaim defiantly. “What on earth would be unsatisfactory here?”

The above (indulgently written) situation is sadly not uncommon. So, from here on in, I am going to give you the lowdown on some feedback that I have seen on audits that you might not have seen elsewhere. And yes, all of these have genuinely happened.

These are not designed to scaremonger or plug our services (our Transport Manager Refresher gets rave reviews, by the way), but are just there to help out you, the reader of this article.

When is a Licence Check not a Licence Check?

When it isn’t carried out on the DVLA website would be a good first bet.

Merely photocopying your driver’s photocard at the beginning of employment will not cut the mustard. Licences should be checked via the DVLA (or other automated services) at least once per quarter according to the Traffic Commissioners’ statutory guidance. This frequency might also need to be increased if the driver is high risk, i.e. they have more than three points, for example.

Now here’s the clincher: on a recent desk-based assessment feedback, the DVSA officer specifically asked for the printed version to be signed and dated by the TM/responsible person and the driver to demonstrate that they were present. For someone who is very much digital and hates printing, this was something of a blow. Also, the checks are time-stamped.

Remember, if you are not using an automated system, you must devise a way of demonstrating who, how and when.

What unnamed item of workshop equipment is actually a necessity?

Check your Guide to Maintaining Roadworthiness, go on, have a look. Page 46, “Safety Inspection Facilities”, and pick out the line about a “calibrated torque wrench”.

Got it? See it there?

No, you can’t. It doesn’t exist.

Does that mean you need one? Absolutely it does.

In the eyes of enforcement, a calibrated torque wrench is a necessity (I see this as being reasonable, it just annoys me that it isn’t in GTMR). Even if it’s your maintenance provider’s torque wrench, you need to know about it. Make sure you have the calibration certificate and make sure it’s in date.

I once saw feedback where there was an unsatisfactory issued because the torque wrench was brand new and the supplier didn’t issue calibration certificates with the purchase. Remember, more is most definitely more when it comes to documentation.

When is less definitely not more?

Well logically, the answer to this question is “all the time”. However, I learned this lesson the hard way when it came to maintenance documentation.

One of the key benefits of a digital walkaround check recording system is the option to create check records specific to your fleet. This does not, I repeat does not, transfer to PMI records.

One of the first things I would look at when auditing a company is their daily defect reporting on paper sheets, to see if the drivers were ticking everything on the sheet even if it didn’t apply to their vehicles (for example trailer coupling on a concrete mixer). This would give me cast-iron evidence that daily checks were not being carried out correctly.

A way of negating this would be to set your digital checking system to only cover items specific to the vehicle in which the check has been carried out. Hey presto, one avenue of interrogation (partially) closed.

As a plucky young transport manager and software enthusiast, I thought I would do the very same to a digital PMI sheet for a fleet of rigid vehicles. I did so enthusiastically, and removed anything that I thought related to trailer connections etc., purely to streamline the operation and remove any critical thinking element from my mechanic.

How wrong I was.

This created an “Unsatisfactory” on maintenance inspection records at MIVR. Make sure your maintenance record sheets are in line with GTMR requirements. I have given you an unusual example, but other things to be aware of are making sure that tyre ages are recorded, tyre pressures are recorded as “in” and “out”, and that the initial part of the sheet is correctly completed, including ISO week.

All my brake tests are passes! Aren’t they?

Pass does not necessarily mean pass.

I admit, I don’t know for sure how hard this is being enforced. I have seen two sets of investigation records in the last two weeks that have been at opposite ends of the scrutiny scale. The brake test reports that were deemed sufficient at one inspection certainly would not have been at the other.

Things to consider are these:

Just because it says pass, doesn’t mean it has. Especially if it’s unladen.

The DVSA have stated the following:

If your report shows a result of “Pass (Locks)”, your vehicle will have passed because more than half of its wheels locked during the test. Although your vehicle passed, your wheels may have locked too quickly to give accurate results. If this was because your vehicle wasn’t loaded to at least 65% of its weight, you should get another brake test with a properly loaded vehicle as soon as you can.

Is your DTP number accurately recorded on your PMI sheet?

It sounds painfully minor, doesn’t it? The sort of thing that only the most committed paperwork enthusiast could possibly get excited about. And yet, here we are.

If your laden brake test is being carried out away from your own premises, or at a Designated Testing Facility/Point, the details on the paperwork need to marry up. In other words, if the brake test report says one thing, the PMI sheet says another, and the workshop invoice appears to have been completed by a man in a hurry balancing on a gearbox, then you are inviting questions you do not want to answer.

The DTP number, site details and associated brake test information should all make sense together. It is all part of demonstrating that the brake performance report genuinely relates to that vehicle, on that date, as part of that particular inspection. If it is missing, incorrect or inconsistent, it can suggest a lack of control over the process. And as we all know, once the phrase “lack of control” starts being muttered in your general direction, the colours on the front of the report rarely get brighter.

This is particularly important where the operator is relying heavily on a third-party maintenance provider. Because while they may be doing the inspections, arranging the brake tests and filing the sheets in a beautiful rainbow-coloured folder system, the responsibility still lands with the operator.

Which is, unfortunately, you.

So yes, check the DTP number. Check the vehicle registration. Check the date. Check that the brake test result can clearly be tied back to the inspection record. Check that whoever completed the PMI sheet hasn’t left half the boxes blank and then written “see report” as though that is a magic spell that makes deficiencies disappear.

Because it isn’t.

The sting in the tail

The awkward truth in all of this is that modern compliance is not just about doing the right things. It is about being able to prove, clearly and consistently, that the right things were done, by the right people, at the right time, in the right way.

That is the bit that catches operators out.

You can have vehicles inspected on time. You can have brake tests. You can have licences checked. You can have defects rectified promptly. You can have a maintenance provider who is, by all reasonable standards, decent at what they do. And you can still end up staring at an amber box wondering which administrative gremlin has sabotaged your peaceful existence.

Because DVSA do not always assess you on the good intentions behind your systems. They assess you on the evidence in front of them.

So, what is the lesson here? It is not to panic. It is not to throw every file you own onto the boardroom table and begin scanning documents until midnight. And it is certainly not to ring your maintenance provider and ask whether they have, in fact, been hiding secret prohibitions from you for sport.

It is simply this: audit your own operation with a colder eye.

Look at your systems as an enforcement officer would. Assume nothing. Match documents together. Question inconsistencies. Be suspicious of anything that is always a “pass” but never tells you very much. And where a provider says, “Don’t worry, it’s all sorted,” make sure you can evidence how it is sorted.

Because the gap between “generally compliant” and “satisfactory at investigation” can be much smaller than many operators realise.

If this article does nothing else, hopefully it prompts a few awkward questions in the right places before DVSA get the chance to ask them for you.

And that, in compliance terms, is usually time well spent.