Running agency puts you in an awkward spot compliance-wise. Different vehicle every week. Different analyser software. Different transport manager who may or may not even know your name. And one tacho card, in your wallet, with every infringement from every job permanently on it for the last 365 days.
Here's the question I get asked most at Lymm and Stafford Services: when something goes wrong on an agency shift, whose licence takes the hit? The driver's? The agency's? The hiring operator's?
Short answer: usually yours, often the operator's, sometimes the agency's. Depends what went wrong. Let me break it down properly.
The driver's personal card — always yours
Your digital tachograph driver card is issued to you personally by DVLA. It's your licence. Every minute of driving you do, under any O-licence, on any vehicle, is recorded against that card. Infringements found on your card are attributable to you, the driver, irrespective of who you were working for at the moment of the infringement.
If DVSA download your card at a roadside stop on Thursday, they see everything you've driven for the last 365 days. The Monday shift for Agency A on Operator X's trucks. The Wednesday shift for Agency B on Operator Y's trucks. All of it. The penalty for a drivers' hours infringement on your card goes to you, personally, as a graduated fixed penalty — £100, £200, or £300 depending on severity — or as a summons if it's serious enough.
This is the bit most new agency drivers don't fully grasp. Your compliance record is a single cumulative ledger that moves with you between jobs. Leaving the job doesn't erase the record.
The operator's O-licence — their side of it
When you drive for a hiring operator on one of their vehicles, you're driving under their O-licence. The operator has a duty under the Goods Vehicles (Licensing of Operators) Act 1995 to ensure drivers' hours rules are observed and tacho records are kept. Breaches on their vehicles hit their Operator Compliance Risk Score and can be raised at a Public Inquiry before the Traffic Commissioner.
So: an infringement typically hits both you and the operator. You get the fixed penalty, the operator gets the OCRS points and — if repeated — a TM Public Inquiry.
That's why decent operators actually care about agency compliance. A bad agency driver can drop their OCRS band single-handedly. I've seen a fleet go amber on the traffic score because two separate agency drivers — both dismissed — left infringements that came out of the wash two months after the drivers had gone.
The agency's role — which is smaller than you might think
This is where it gets interesting.
Most driver agencies do not hold an O-licence. They're not the operator. They're the labour supplier. Their compliance obligations are narrower than the operator's, and they don't carry an OCRS score of their own.
Their legal duties are mostly about the employment relationship — paying you correctly, checking your licence and CPC status before placing you, ensuring you haven't been flagged as unfit to drive. Some agencies run their own tacho downloads as a service to the driver, but they're not legally required to.
What the agency does not get — for the most part — is a DVSA enforcement visit over a driver's hours infringement. The operator gets that. The driver gets the fixed penalty.
Where an agency does get drawn in: if there's evidence that the agency knew about repeated infringements and continued placing the driver anyway. Or if the agency is mis-stating your qualifications. That's repute-level stuff and can end in Traffic Commissioner action against the agency's principals if they're also O-licence holders in another capacity.
The "whose fault is it" question
At a roadside check, DVSA don't really care whose fault it was. They see the infringement on the card and the vehicle unit. They issue the fixed penalty. You pay it or you contest it at court.
What you might argue, if you contest it, is that the operator or agency pressured you to drive past a rest point. In practice this defence rarely works. The Traffic Commissioner's office has heard every version of "the office told me to push on." You are the driver. You had the card. You made the choice to carry on past the break.
The realistic defence in a contested case is proving the tacho was defective or the offence didn't actually happen as recorded. Fighting a genuine drivers' hours offence by blaming someone else almost never lands.
The operator's defence to their own OCRS hit can include showing they have a system for driver selection, briefing, and monitoring, and that the infringement was a one-off outside their control. If they can show that, DVSA may lean less heavily. Not eliminate the hit — just reduce the ongoing focus.
The common agency traps
Three patterns I see repeatedly put agency drivers in bad spots:
1. Card hopping between multiple operators in one working day. You finish a shift for Operator A at 12:00. An agency rings at 13:00 offering a short shift for Operator B starting 14:00. You go. Your card's in the vehicle for Operator B from 14:00. The issue: your daily rest period is counted from the end of your previous working activity, not from when you first boarded Operator B's vehicle. If you hadn't accumulated at least 9 hours of rest between the two shifts, you've broken the daily rest rule the moment you start driving for Operator B. The infringement is on your card, under Operator B's unit, but the cause was the morning shift.
2. Forgotten manual entry across agencies. You work a day shift for Operator A. Take your card out. A week later you work for Operator C and stick your card back in. The tacho asks you to account for the gap since your last card-out. If you don't enter the intervening activity correctly — including any work you did for Operator B in between — your record shows gaps that will raise flags on any subsequent download. DVSA treats gaps as suspicion of tampering.
3. POA used when you should have used other work. Different operators have different policies on when to mark POA versus other work. If Operator A says "always POA in tipping queues" and Operator B says "only POA when you have a known booked time," you can end up with a mixed record that looks like you're gaming the system. Over 365 days of mixed usage, an analyser can flag this as a pattern.
None of these are your fault in any moral sense. They're the result of genuine friction between different working environments. But legally, they all land on your card and your licence.
The weekly and fortnightly limits across operators
This is the one that catches agency drivers out most.
The 56-hour weekly driving limit and the 90-hour fortnightly driving limit apply to you as a driver. Not per operator. Total. Across every vehicle you drive.
If you drive 30 hours for Operator A on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, then 30 hours for Operator B on Thursday, Friday — that's 60 hours of driving this week. You're already over the 56-hour cap. The fact that no single operator has you down for more than 30 hours is irrelevant. Your card knows. Your next download will show it.
I've seen agency drivers pick up Most Serious Infringement status on exactly this pattern. They were careful within each operator's system but nobody was adding up the total because nobody had the data for both sides.
Fix: keep your own running total. A notebook, a spreadsheet, an app — whatever works. Update it at the end of every shift. Know your rolling weekly and fortnightly driving totals.
I cover the daily and weekly limits themselves in this earlier post, including the 10-hour extended days and the 90-hour fortnight calculation.
Card downloads when you move between operators
Your card has to be downloaded every 28 days. The operator you're currently working for is the one who's legally responsible for doing it — but "currently working for" gets ambiguous when you move between agencies and operators weekly.
In practice, most operators download your card on your first shift with them if it's been more than a few days since the last download. Some operators don't bother if they're only using you for one shift. That's how cards end up not downloaded for 35 days and you then get an infringement for an undownloadable gap.
Protect yourself: buy a home card reader. A digifobpro or similar costs about £100. Reads your card in 60 seconds. Store the downloads on a USB stick. If an operator ever asks "when was your card last downloaded," you can tell them with a date and a file. If DVSA ever asks at a roadside, you can show them a clean 12-month personal record.
What the operator actually owes you — and what they don't
When you're placed with an operator through an agency, the operator has a duty to brief you on their specific policies before you drive their vehicles. That's:
- Site rules (PPE, one-way systems, parking)
- Vehicle-specific items (the refrigeration unit controls, the curtain buckles, the pallet truck location)
- Tacho and compliance expectations (their POA policy, their break discipline, their manual-entry expectations)
A good briefing takes 15 minutes. A bad briefing is "keys are in the ignition, here's the manifest, off you go." If you get a bad briefing and then pick up an infringement, you have a defensible argument that the operator didn't do their duty. That argument is for the Traffic Commissioner's office, not for the roadside DVSA officer. But it's worth having.
What the operator does not owe you: training on 561/2006 itself. You're expected to know the rules. That's what CPC is for.
The agency's due diligence — what they should be checking
Before an agency places you, they should verify:
- Your driving licence is current and has the right categories (Cat C, Cat C+E, etc.)
- Your Driver CPC is valid and the card hasn't expired
- You've declared any infringements or convictions in the relevant period
- You have a valid right to work in the UK
If the agency places you on a job where you don't have the right category or your CPC has expired, and DVSA pulls you, the agency has exposure. Not on OCRS, because they're not the operator, but on reputational and contractual grounds. Some agencies have been excluded from operator supplier lists for this.
Protect yourself by never relying on the agency to remind you about your own CPC expiry or licence renewal. Keep your own diary. Check DVSA every quarter.
The sharp end: repeat infringements
An agency driver with a record of repeat infringements becomes unplaceable. Not officially — no agency puts you on a blacklist with your name on it. But word gets around. TMs talk. An operator who picked up a red flag on your last tacho download will tell the agency manager not to send you back. The agency will quietly stop offering you the good shifts.
If your own personal card shows more than three or four graduated fixed penalties in the last 12 months, you're carrying a reputational problem that costs you money every week. Not in fines, necessarily. In missed shifts.
The recovery is the same as an operator's OCRS recovery: 12 months of clean driving. Infringements age off your card at 365 days. A year of discipline resets your standing. Nothing faster will do it.
The simple rule for working across multiple operators
If I were writing this on the back of a fag packet for a newly-qualified agency driver:
- Your card is yours. Everything you drive is on it for 365 days.
- Your running weekly and fortnightly totals are across all operators. Keep a personal log.
- Your daily rest must be at least 9 hours since your last working activity, regardless of who you worked for.
- If two agencies offer you shifts that overlap in a way that breaks daily rest, turn the second one down. No rate is worth an infringement.
- Get your own card reader. Download your card yourself, monthly.
- Never let an operator or agency push you past a break point. The penalty is on you.
Honest CTA
If you're juggling three agencies and two operators, and your weekly driving total is a number you guess at, ShiftOwt gives agency drivers their own cross-operator compliance view — £5.99/mo for drivers, agency pricing on request. Your card data, your totals, your rest windows, visible to you regardless of whose yard you last rolled out of. Took me three agencies to figure out nobody else was going to do this for me.