A mate of mine runs a five-vehicle fleet out of Coventry. Last spring he got a surge of work — more than his own vehicles could cover — and brought in a self-employed driver he knew. Driver used the operator's curtainsider, did three days of distribution work, and got a PG9 on day three for a minor hours infringement and a defective trailer light cluster.
The PG9 went on my mate's OCRS. Not the driver's OCRS — the operator's. Because the vehicle was on my mate's operator licence. And the driver, whatever his employment status for tax purposes, was driving a vehicle under that licence. The fact that he was "self-employed" had no bearing at all on where the DVSA encounter landed.
This is the thing about sub-contracting that small fleet operators often don't fully reckon with until it happens to them. Your O-licence is the authorisation to use vehicles for hire or reward. Whoever's in the cab, if the vehicle is on your licence, you're responsible for it.
What an operator licence actually authorises
An operator licence is an authorisation issued to an operator — a legal person or entity — to use specified vehicles for hire or reward. The vehicles listed on the licence are the operator's vehicles. The drivers who operate those vehicles are operating under the licence.
The operator licence holder is responsible to the Traffic Commissioner for: the vehicles' roadworthiness and maintenance, the drivers' compliance with drivers' hours rules and tachograph requirements, and the overall conduct of the transport operation. That responsibility doesn't transfer to the driver just because they're self-employed. It doesn't transfer to an agency that supplied them. It stays with the licence holder.
When DVSA encounters one of your vehicles at the roadside, the encounter is recorded against the operator. Not against the driver. Not against whoever organised the job. The prohibition, the infringement, the fixed penalty — all of that lands in your OCRS. That's the reality of the accountability structure that the TC oversees.
The self-employed driver question
There's a common misunderstanding about "self-employed" in transport. Many drivers work as self-employed for tax purposes — they're paid gross through a CIS arrangement or as sole traders. That's an HMRC question about employment status.
But for operator licence purposes, DVSA purposes, and traffic commissioner purposes, the employment-status question doesn't really arise. What matters is: is this driver operating a vehicle that's on your O-licence? If yes, you're responsible for their compliance while they do so.
If you're using a self-employed driver in your vehicle and on your jobs, the Traffic Commissioner's expectation is that you manage them the same way you'd manage a directly employed driver. That means: checking their licence and tacho card validity before they start, ensuring they understand your compliance procedures, monitoring their drivers' hours data, and having a system for notifying them of any defects or issues found on the vehicle.
Saying "I didn't know what he was doing because he's self-employed" at a public inquiry is not a position that goes down well. The TC's view is that if you put someone in one of your vehicles, you took on the responsibility for their operation of it. The fact that you don't pay their holiday or their national insurance is irrelevant to that.
When you use an owner-driver in their own vehicle
This is a different and more complicated situation. An owner-driver with their own vehicle — say, a driver who owns a tractor unit and wants to do subcontract work for you — is carrying goods for hire or reward. Unless they have their own operator licence, they're not legally permitted to do that.
The requirement for an operator licence under the Goods Vehicles (Licensing of Operators) Act 1995 applies to anyone using a goods vehicle with a gross weight over 3.5 tonnes for hire or reward. "Hire or reward" means being paid to carry other people's goods. An owner-driver who subcontracts to you and carries your customers' goods in their own vehicle is carrying goods for hire or reward. They need their own licence.
Some small operators try to structure this as "the driver carries our goods, not customers' goods" — paying the driver a fee rather than a haulage rate, treating them as a labour-only subcontractor rather than a haulage subcontractor. Whether that structure genuinely takes the operation outside the operator licensing requirement depends on the precise facts, and it's the kind of question that looks very different at a compliance desk than it does at a kitchen table.
If you're going to use owner-drivers regularly, take proper advice on the structure. The risk of getting it wrong — vehicles operating without an O-licence, or vehicles on your O-licence that you don't actually control — is a public inquiry risk that can put your own licence in jeopardy.
OCRS and the sub-contractor problem
The Operator Compliance Risk Score (OCRS) reflects all DVSA encounters with vehicles on your licence over a three-year rolling window. Prohibition, fixed penalties, vehicle defects found at roadside — all of it goes in. The TC uses OCRS as a primary indicator of compliance standards when deciding whether to call an operator in for a public inquiry or to take regulatory action.
I wrote about OCRS and how it works in more detail elsewhere, but the sub-contracting implication is this: if you're using sub-contracted or self-employed drivers in your vehicles and their compliance is poor, your OCRS suffers. Not theirs. Yours.
A single PG9 from a sub-contractor driving your curtainsider won't necessarily move you into the OCRS red zone on its own. But if your fleet is small — five vehicles, say — and you have two or three DVSA encounters across a rolling twelve months from sub-contracted work, you can find yourself looking at a compliance letter from the TC when your own directly employed drivers are clean.
What the transport manager's responsibility looks like here
The transport manager of record on your O-licence is professionally responsible for the compliance of the operation. That includes any vehicles and drivers operating under the licence, regardless of employment status.
In practice, that means a transport manager needs to know when sub-contracted drivers are using licence vehicles, needs to see their licences and tacho cards beforehand, needs to have a mechanism for downloading and analysing their tachograph data, and needs to be able to demonstrate to the TC — if it comes to it — that they exercised proper oversight.
If a sub-contracted driver gets a prohibition and the transport manager says they didn't know who was in that vehicle or when — that's a repute problem. The TC will ask why the TM wasn't tracking who was driving licence vehicles. The answer "I didn't know he was doing that job" is not a satisfying one.
How to manage it properly
If you're going to use self-employed or sub-contracted drivers in your licence vehicles, structure it properly:
- Check their licence and tacho card before the first shift — a DVLA OLAS check, the same as you'd do for an employed driver
- Brief them on your defect reporting procedure — walk-around check, what to report, who to contact
- Include them in your tachograph download schedule — their card data needs to be downloaded within the same 28-day window as your employed drivers
- Keep a record of which jobs they did and which vehicle they drove
- Make clear that they operate under your compliance procedures while they're in your vehicle
None of that is extraordinary. It's just the same compliance process you'd apply to an employed driver, applied consistently to sub-contracted ones as well.
The alternative — treating sub-contracted drivers as someone else's problem while they're in your vehicle — works fine until it doesn't. And when it stops working, it stops working in your OCRS, not theirs.
ShiftOwt tracks 561/WTD compliance for drivers and fleets — from £5.99/month for drivers, fleet pricing on request. If you're managing a small fleet with a mix of employed and sub-contracted drivers, having the hours data in one place makes the transport manager oversight conversation a lot easier.