There's a specific kind of slow-motion panic when a DVSA officer holds out his hand and you're already reaching for the folder above the sun visor — and somewhere in the back of your head a small voice says: how many operators have you worked for this month again?
Three, as it happened. DIRFT the first week, a frozen food warehouse near Coventry midweek, then a steel haul out of Immingham at the weekend. All different operators, different vehicles, different tachographs. One driver card. One record. One officer who wanted to see 28 days of it.
I got through it, just. But it made me get the rules straight — what you're actually required to carry, what the operators owe the regulators, and where the gap opens up when you're agency or tramping across multiple sites.
What you must produce at roadside
Under assimilated EU rules — that's retained EU Regulation 561/2006, still in force in Great Britain — you must be able to produce at roadside inspection records covering the current day and the previous 28 calendar days. Doing international journeys to or from EU member countries? That extends to 56 days.
Not the last week. Not since you started the current booking. Twenty-eight calendar days, whoever you were working for inside that window.
For tramping drivers in a single fleet on a single vehicle, this is usually fine — everything's on the card, everything's on the vehicle unit, the record runs continuously. For agency drivers moving between yards, between vehicles, and sometimes between different digital tacho types, it's more complicated. The card holds all of it — but you can't always rely on an officer being willing to read raw card data in the cab. Sometimes they want a printout. Sometimes they want a signed printout with any manual entries noted alongside it.
Print your records. Before you leave each booking, run a card print from the tacho, sign it, keep it. A folder in the cab, an envelope above the visor, a glovebox stuffed with paper — whatever works. It's not sophisticated. It works.
The 28-day download — whose job is it really?
Here's where agency work creates a gap most operators don't plug. The regulation requiring operators to download driver card data every 28 calendar days also requires them to download it before a driver leaves their employment. Not within 28 days of departure. Before the driver goes.
Most agencies don't consistently do this. The ones running lean, with a dispatcher managing fifty drivers across three regions and a load due at Immingham before dawn — the download is not going to be first on the list. Which means the card data from your last two days on their books might not get pulled until weeks later, or at all if you leave in a hurry.
The download obligation belongs to the operator. They breach it, it's on their OCRS record and their licence history. It doesn't land directly on you. But if there's a gap in the operator's records that covers a period when there was also an infringement — even a minor one — the question becomes: whose records show what, and when did anyone notice?
Ask for a card data printout before you finish each booking. Not after. Before. Some operators do it as standard. Others need asking. A few will look at you as if you've said something strange — that's fine, just ask again.
What operators are required to keep
The operator obligations are clearer than most TMs realise. They must:
- Download driver card data at least every 28 calendar days — or immediately before a driver leaves employment
- Download vehicle unit data at least every 90 calendar days
- Retain all records — digital downloads, charts, printouts, manual records — for 12 months, available to produce for DVSA enforcement officers
- Actively analyse that data to check for rule compliance
The 90-day window on the vehicle unit is an outer limit, not a target. If the data card in a high-mileage unit fills before 90 days — and on certain tramping work it will — the download obligation moves earlier. The counter resets on download, not on the calendar.
The 12-month retention requirement is worth understanding from the driver side too. If you ran for an operator nine months ago on a two-week booking, and something from that period surfaces in an OCRS check or a public inquiry referral, the operator should still have the records. They're not allowed to have deleted them. If they have, that's a compliance failure on top of whatever triggered the review.
Manual entries: the bit everyone skips
Digital tachographs give you four activity modes: DRIVE, OTHER WORK, AVAILABILITY, REST. Most drivers use DRIVE while driving and REST for everything else. It's wrong, and it's almost universal.
OTHER WORK covers any physical work not involving driving — loading, sheeting, strapping, pre-drive walkaround, refuelling, washing the vehicle. If you're parked at Lymm Services at 10pm and spending 25 minutes unstrapping curtainsiders before getting into your bunk, that's OTHER WORK, not REST.
AVAILABILITY is for periods when you're at the operator's disposal but not doing anything active — waiting in a loading dock queue, sitting at a customer gate, on standby between collections.
Sloppy mode entries won't usually trigger a prohibition by themselves. But Working Time Directive calculations depend on accurately recorded working time — and OTHER WORK hours count toward your WTD weekly total in a way REST hours don't. If you've been logging actual work as REST, your WTD hours will look better than they are. Until someone checks.
The multi-operator information obligation
There's a regulation most agency drivers have never been told about. If you're working at the disposal of more than one operator, you must provide each of them with enough information to verify that you're compliant.
It's not just about the card download. It means if you've worked 50 hours for Operator A this week and you show up to Operator B on Thursday, Operator B needs to know your hours to date. They cannot legally dispatch you on a full shift if you're already at or near your weekly limit. That obligation — to inform — sits on you as well as on whatever system the agency uses.
In practice: carry printouts that show the current week's hours. Some agency dispatch systems share this data automatically between operators. Many don't. If your agency is texting you a start time and a postcode and nothing else, they're not running the compliance check, and you're the one at the roadside if the numbers don't add up.
A mate of mine — running agency out of Stafford, good driver, eight years Class 1 — had a bad afternoon at a check site near Sheffield because neither operator had a complete picture of his hours that week. The infringement sat across both bookings, neither operator had flagged it, and the fixed penalty landed on his card. Not the agency's. His.
For tramping drivers specifically
Tramping work has its own record-keeping texture. You're usually in one cab, one card, one vehicle unit — the continuity is there. The issue tends to be the completeness and accuracy of what's recorded rather than gaps between operators.
A tramping driver I know who runs out of a depot near Carlisle does this: end of every week, he prints a card summary, notes any manual entries, and emails it to himself. He's got three years of weekly records in a Gmail folder. You don't need that level of organisation. You do need to be able to produce 28 days of legible records in a format that doesn't require a specialist to interpret.
Know how to print from your tacho. Know where on the head the printout button is. Know how to sign and annotate a printout if you've made manual entries. These are not complicated skills, but I've seen drivers stopped at roadside who couldn't do any of them, and it does not make a good impression.
If you're running analogue — which is still out there on some older kit and specialist vehicles — chart handling matters too. Used charts go back to the operator within 42 days. Keep them in order. Don't fold or crease them in a way that obscures the trace. The charts are the record; a damaged chart is a missing record.
What happens if the records aren't there
At roadside, a failure to produce records can result in a fixed penalty — graduated depending on the seriousness — and a note on the DVSA encounter record. It doesn't automatically trigger a prohibition, but it will influence OCRS weighting for the operator whose vehicle you're in.
Persistent record-keeping failures across a fleet — shown up in a targeted check or a systematic data review — are the kind of thing that moves an operator from green to amber on OCRS, and from amber toward red. At that point the Traffic Commissioner gets involved, and the questions stop being about individual drivers and start being about whether the operator's licence should continue at all.
This sounds extreme for what's essentially a paperwork obligation. But the records are the only evidence you have that the driving happened legally. Without them, DVSA have to assume the worst — and they're allowed to.
A routine that actually works
End of each week: print a card summary. Note any manual entries. Keep it in the cab for 28 days. Before leaving any agency booking: get a printout from the operator, or print one yourself. Carry your 28-day window at all times.
It takes about ten minutes a week if you're disciplined about it. And once you've got stopped at a check site without the right paper in your hand, you'll find the ten minutes.
If you're tired of managing compliance records in a folder above the sun visor, ShiftOwt tracks 561/WTD compliance automatically — £5.99/mo for drivers, agency pricing on request.
The operator-side obligations — OCRS implications included — are covered in more detail in the OCRS post. And for the liability split when an infringement lands on a multi-operator booking, the agency driver hours post goes into how the enforcement pressure distributes.