LINK Group, one of Scotland’s largest housing and support service organisations, is working with Glasgow-based licence-checking and compliance business, DriverCheck, to ensure employees driving personal and corporate vehicles are legally compliant.

Link Group operates a number of award-winning social enterprise companies serving over 10,000 customers across 26 Scottish local authorities – making it one of the largest social landlords in Scotland. Given the diversity of its businesses and the varying work requirements, Link Group now has a total of 584 drivers across its various activities, 393 of whom use their own vehicles on company business, the so-called ‘grey fleet,’ with the remainder operating approximately 165 company-owned vans.

Grey fleet is a major national issue with an estimated 4-5 million grey fleet vehicles on UK roads. Estimates suggest that 20% of these vehicles are not properly insured for business purposes and that 30% of road accidents involve an employee driving for work in a grey fleet vehicle.

To ensure its drivers were legally compliant in accordance with its occupational road risk policy and that the risk to the business was minimised, Link Group appointed DriverCheck, which specialises in providing managed services that include licence checking and risk and grey fleet management.

DriverCheck now checks and verifies the eligibility of all Link Group grey fleet vehicles, including MOT, road tax and insurance details, and confirms that all driving licences are up to date and relevant.

As part of its managed service, it produces a fortnightly client report highlighting those drivers whose details have expired, along with those who have not responded to emails asking them to update their details. Those who still fail to respond are then pursued internally, with a lack of responses escalated up to line managers for further action.

DriverCheck also carries out licence checks on the company-owned van fleet, with frequency based on the perceived risk of the drivers. Those who have 0-5 points on their licences have them checked annually, those with 6-8 points are checked every six months and those at most risk with 9-12 points are checked every three months.

Sharon Taylor, HR Shared Services Team Leader at Link Group, said that the scale of the grey fleet now meant that it had become too large to manage effectively internally. She said: “We wanted a specialist provider of managed services to take over this issue for us and to ensure we were legally compliant in terms of our occupational road risk policy.

“DriverCheck has brought us peace of mind and effectively taken away the admin and logistical burden of managing the grey fleet for us, ensuring our drivers are operating within the teams of our road risk policy and allowing us to concentrate on more mainstream activities.”