In 2017 a record number of over 1.4 million drivers were sent to offender retraining courses by the police. This includes more than one million caught for speeding offences. The first year these courses were offered was 2010 and the police can now send offenders on nine different courses. Most (1,195,356 drivers) were sent on the national speed awareness course and 92,386 people completed the ‘What’s Driving Us?’ course. Most offences were detected by camera and there are big differences between police forces on detection and how offences were disposed of, see Dr Adam Snow’s report. According to research conducted on behalf of RAC Insurance published in 2016 almost 9 out of 10 motorists would not tell their employer if they received points on their driving licence, see blog post. In an audit of over 12,000 drivers’ licenses conducted via Descartes’ SmartLicence, it was found that 2.5% of drivers had an expired licence or were perilously close to losing their licence with nine or more points. 15% had speed limit offences and in total, over 3,000 offences were identified. This audit is indicative of the risks to which operators are exposed. So how can employers manage the risk? The only way to manage the risk is to use a driving licence verification solution such as SmartLicence to check licences against the DVLA database. With SmartLicence checks are conducted according to the risk profile of individual drivers – the more points on their licence the more frequent the checks. Plus, if your employee doesn’t inform you of any new points the SmartAlerts facility provides automated email alerts to issues that need your attention such as new points. Get a quote for SmartLicence.