Informational, not legal advice, and deliberately silent on insurance cover — that varies by policy and no article can tell you what yours includes. Every rule links to the gov.uk page it came from, all consulted on 25 September 2026.
Two lists, and only one of them is about vehicles
A delivery operation carries two standing obligations that never pause because the week is busy.
Per vehicle: MOT, service intervals, the daily check, tax and insurance. Per driver: a licence that is valid for the vehicle and free of anything that changes the answer.
Miss something on either list and the consequence is identical and immediate — a van or a driver you cannot legally put on a route tomorrow. The scorecard records that as a delivery problem. The cause was a date.
Checking a driver's licence: you need their cooperation
You cannot look up a driver's licence on your own, and it is worth understanding exactly why.
GOV.UK requires two things: the last eight characters of the licence number, and a check code the driver generates. The code is valid for 21 days and can be used once. There is also a postal route, form D888/1, at a £5 fee.
And the sentence that should shape your process, quoted from gov.uk: "It's a criminal offence to obtain someone else's personal information without their permission."
Three consequences follow, and they are operational rather than legal.
A licence check is not something you can do in a batch on a quiet afternoon. Every check needs a living driver to produce a code, which means the process has to be asked for, and asking has to be somebody's job.
A code used once is a check valid for one moment. There is no subscription, no ongoing feed, no notification when an endorsement lands. Whatever interval you choose, you are choosing how long you are willing to be uninformed.
And a check done at hiring and never repeated tells you about the driver you hired, not the one driving today.
MOT: the calendar item with no excuses
A vehicle's first MOT falls due at the third anniversary of registration — some vehicle types are tested at one year — and annually thereafter, on the anniversary of the last test.
The penalty for driving without a valid one is up to £1,000, per gov.uk as at 25 September 2026. Driving an untested vehicle is not permitted except to travel to a repair or a booked test.
For a single van this is a diary entry. For a fleet it is a scheduling problem disguised as an admin problem, and the reason is the exception in that last sentence: the vehicle comes off the road before the expiry date, not on it, because the test has to be booked into someone else's calendar.
Which means an MOT is really two dates — the expiry, and the day the van is actually unavailable — and only the first one is written anywhere. The second one is a route to re-cover, and it belongs next to the rota rather than in a maintenance folder.
The daily check, and why it is not paperwork
The walkaround before the route and the check after it are the cheapest control in the whole operation, and the one most likely to decay.
They decay in a predictable way. The morning check survives because it happens at the start of a shift, when there is structure. The evening check is the one that goes, at the end of a long day, in the dark, with the driver already thinking about going home.
That is unfortunate, because the evening check is the one that establishes when damage happened. A scuff found on Tuesday morning belongs to Monday's route if Monday evening's check exists, and belongs to nobody if it does not. "Belongs to nobody" is a cost you absorb.
What makes a check useful rather than decorative is that a defect reaches someone. A photograph attached to the van, with a time on it, survives the week. The same photograph in a group chat does not survive Thursday.
Hired vans and spares carry the same obligations
Almost no DSP runs only the vans it owns. There is the hire covering a vehicle in the garage, the spare kept for the morning something does not start, and the short-term rental taken on for peak.
They carry the same list — a check before the route, a driver on record, damage that somebody will be billed for. And they are the ones that fall outside the spreadsheet, because the spreadsheet was built around the fleet list and a hire is by definition not on it.
The two dates that matter on a hired van are the ones nobody writes down: when it arrived and in what condition, and when it went back and in what condition. Those are the whole of your position when the hire company sends its own assessment, and they cost nothing to record on the day.
Fines and infringements: who pays, and how you find out
A penalty notice arrives weeks after the event, addressed to the registered keeper, describing a vehicle at a time and place.
Turning that into a person is the whole problem. If who drove which van on which day lives in a rota someone has since edited, or in a manager's memory, you have two unattractive options: absorb the cost, or have an argument you cannot evidence.
Whether anything can be recovered from the driver depends on how that driver is engaged and on what was agreed in writing, before the event — and it is specific enough to be worth asking someone qualified about your own contracts rather than copying the depot down the road. What is the same in every case is that you need the assignment record, and you need it to be the one written at the time.
Insurance: the one place this article stops
Delivery work, goods carried, named drivers, young drivers, business use — all of it varies by policy, and an article that told you what your cover includes would be making it up.
The only general thing worth saying is procedural. Know which vehicles are on which policy, know the renewal dates, and know what your insurer requires you to be able to produce after an incident. That last one is usually a documented daily check and a record of who was driving — the same two artefacts that everything else on this page depends on.
The cost of finding out late
Every item here is cheap on the day it is due and expensive on the day it is discovered.
An MOT booked three weeks out costs a slot you chose. An MOT discovered expired costs a van, a route, and a driver standing in the depot. A licence check requested in advance costs an email. The same check after an incident costs you the answer to a question you should already have had.
None of this needs sophisticated software. It needs the dates to be attached to the thing they belong to — the van, the driver — and visible before the week they bite. If the reminder is a person remembering, the system is the person, and people leave.
Sources
All consulted 25 September 2026.
- Check someone's driving licence information — the last eight characters, the check code, 21 days, single use, the D888/1 route and the criminal-offence warning
- Getting an MOT — first test timing, annual thereafter, and the up-to-£1,000 penalty
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