Introduction
HMSL places motor insurance for the fleets of over 60 UMAL Members. These fleets range from just a handful of vehicles up to nearly 200 vehicles of all shapes and sizes. Regardless of the size of your fleet, you have a number of responsibilities.
- Checking Driving Licences
Your motor policy allows for any person who is driving on the order or with the permission of the policyholder (the institution) providing that the person driving has a licence to drive the vehicle or has held and is not disqualified from or prohibited by law from holding or obtaining such a licence. It therefore follows that you need a process in place to check that any person driving under your motor policy meets this requirement. These checks should be at least annual and should also contain a requirement for drivers to notify the institution of any relevant changes during the year.
Overseas Licences
Neither insurers nor HMSL are able to comment on the validity of a driving licence. You must confirm this with the DVLA. EU licenses use a common format and are reasonably easy to check but it can be harder to check licenses from outside the EU, particularly for penalty points or equivalent.
- Declaration Of Motoring Convictions And Medical Conditions
As well as checking the validity of a license, you will need to ascertain whether there are any penalty points or driving disqualifications that require declaration to insurers. In view of the number of vehicles involved and the blanket nature of the cover, insurers prefer to maintain a light touch to avoid you, us or them being swamped with declarations. On that basis, insurers are generally only concerned with ‘serious’ driving convictions such as any offence involving death, dangerous driving, drugs and/or alcohol, bans in excess of 6 months, offenses involving theft, or drivers with more than 6 points on their licence that are still current. You are not required to disclose convictions regarded as ’spent’ under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974. Your license checks must therefore capture the above information and require drivers to declare any changes throughout the year. Any potential driver declaring any of the above must not be allowed to drive until this has been referred to us and insurers have confirmed cover. Insurers will require details of the circumstances and a copy of the license:
https://www.gov.uk/view-driving-licence (England, Scotland and Wales)
https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/services/view-or-share-your-driving-licence-information (Northern Ireland)
In addition, if a driver has a medical condition that requires notification to the DVLA, insurers will allow them to drive provided they have referred the condition to the DVLA, DVLA have granted a licence and the driver follows and complies with any special terms or conditions imposed.
- Maintaining Records On The Motor Insurance Database
The Motor Insurance Database (MID) is a central record of all insured vehicles in the UK. It is managed by the Motor Insurers’ Bureau (MIB) and is used by the Police and DVLA to enforce motor insurance laws. All fleet policyholders have a legal obligation to maintain an accurate record of their fleet on the MID. At renewal each year, insurers upload details of the current motor fleet for each policyholder to the MID. This upload relies on the MID being kept up to date throughout the year. You are responsible for updating the Motor Insurance Database with any changes to your vehicles throughout the period of insurance.
It should be noted that MID credentials expire after 30 days if they have not been used so even if you have no changes to your fleet, it is worth making a diary note to log in every couple of weeks to prevent your credentials from expiring. If you do not currently have MID access, please contact us urgently so we can arrange for insurers to issue login credentials.
Unregistered Vehicles
The requirement to maintain the MID record only relates to registered vehicles, so there is no requirement for unregistered vehicles not designed for road use to appear on the MID and in practice it would be difficult to enter these vehicles because they do not have registration numbers. You will however need to maintain your own records of such vehicles, along with any trailers or other vehicles, as insurers will require this ahead of renewal.
Temporary Vehicles
You are not required to notify the MID of vehicles in your custody or control for 14 days or fewer. You must, however, keep records of these vehicles and they can still be added to the MID if you prefer. We request the number of hire days used at renewal each year and insurers reserve the right to make an additional charge for these.
- Fair Presentation Of Risk
The Insurance Act (2015) changed the requirements for both insurer and insured in terms of the information that is requested and declared. Before entering into a contract of insurance (i.e. at inception and renewal), the (potential) insured is required to disclose either:
- every matter which they know, or ought to know, that would influence the judgement of an insurer in deciding whether to insure the risk and on what terms; or
- sufficient information to put an insurer on notice that it needs to make further enquiries about potentially material circumstances.
Your policy document also sets out the changes that you are required to notify insurers of throughout the year. In practice the nature of a fleet policy means that many of the changes listed would already be picked up by items 1-3 (above), but the general advice is “If in doubt, refer”.
- Driving Overseas
Your policy document sets out the cover provided automatically for vehicles taken temporarily overseas from the UK. This will typically be the EU plus certain other European countries. Please check your policy for full details.
For other countries you must contact us in good time before any proposed journeys so that we can check with insurers as to whether they are able to provide cover and put this in place if needed. This is not guaranteed! You may also require a Green Card and/or International Driving Permit. Details of the requirements can be found here: https://www.gov.uk/driving-abroad
Please note that this cover does not apply to vehicles acquired, hired or leased whilst overseas. In such cases you must ensure that suitable local motor insurance is arranged in order to, at a minimum, comply with the legal requirements of the country(s) you are driving in/through.
