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Operators ask us what should a driver handbook include more often than any other question, usually just before an audit or just after a DVSA encounter.
Operators ask us what should a driver handbook include more often than any other question, usually just before an audit or just after a DVSA encounter.
Clear, practical support written around the operation you run and the evidence an examiner expects to see.
Answer a few focused questions. A transport manager or compliance specialist will review your answers and recommend the right next step.
Get a quoteOperators ask us what should a driver handbook include more often than any other question, usually just before an audit or just after a DVSA encounter. The short answer: every instruction a driver needs to keep your vehicles legal, your licence safe and themselves out of trouble, and nothing else. The longer answer is a contents list where every section earns its place because a law, an operator licence undertaking or an insurer demands it.
That last point matters. When a traffic commissioner reads your handbook at a public inquiry, they are checking whether it maps onto the undertakings you signed when the licence was granted. A handbook assembled from borrowed fragments rarely does. So the honest way to answer what should a driver handbook include is to walk the contents section by section and name the obligation behind each one.
The regulatory spine of the driver handbook contents comes first, because these are the sections DVSA examiners look for by name:
Each of these sits on a statutory duty or on an operator licence undertaking, and the handbook is the written evidence that the system was communicated to drivers. Where a section follows official guidance or good practice rather than statute, say so in the text so that nobody mistakes advice for law.
The roadworthiness sections trace straight back to the DVSA Guide to Maintaining Roadworthiness, which sets out the standards examiners expect and which supports the roadworthiness undertakings on your licence. Anyone asking what should a driver handbook include on the vehicle side needs these four: the daily walkaround check with the full item list for your vehicle types, written defect reporting including nil defect where you use it, the in-service rule that a safety defect stops the vehicle until someone with authority clears it, and loading rules covering weights, axle limits and load security.
Add the roadside encounter: what a driver does when stopped by DVSA or the police, which documents they carry, and the instruction to be polite, honest and to phone the office immediately. Drivers handle inspections far better when the procedure was written down before they needed it.
The conduct chapters protect the business from the risks that walk in wearing a hi-vis. Drink, drugs and medication policy exists because impairment ends careers and lives, and because the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires you to manage it. Mobile phone and distraction rules reflect the six-point offence and your duty not to cause or permit it. Fitness to drive, eyesight and fatigue reporting give a driver a route to say they are not safe today without fear. Accident and incident procedure tells them what to do, photograph and never admit at the scene. Add professional conduct: how drivers represent the company with customers and the public.
When operators ask what should a driver handbook include beyond the legal minimum, this is the area we push hardest, because serious incidents trace back to a person far more often than to a component.
The final part of the driver handbook contents is the operational detail that makes the document yours rather than anyone's: fuel, AdBlue and fuel card rules, routing and bridge height policy for your traffic, site and customer rules including inductions and PPE, vehicle security and key control, agency and subcontract driver arrangements where you use them, and sector add-ons such as FORS or CLOCS requirements, DVS in London, waste transfer paperwork or temperature records.
This is also where the handbook should point drivers to your deeper knowledge material: hours guides, walkaround guides and sector rules kept in the drivers' room or on the company system, so the handbook stays readable while the reference detail stays available. Finish with the signed acknowledgement page and a version control sheet, because a signed acknowledgement is what shows each driver received and accepted the current version.
Half the value of knowing what should a driver handbook include is knowing what to exclude. Leave out reproduced legislation, which nobody reads and which goes stale. Leave out general HR policy that already lives in the staff handbook: holidays, grievance and pension belong there, not in a safety document. Leave out procedures you do not actually operate, because a written rule you ignore is evidence against you, not for you. And leave out padding. A 120 page handbook can say less than a disciplined 35 page one.
A good test before anything goes in: would a DVSA examiner, an insurer or a court expect a driver to have been told this in writing? If yes, it stays. If the honest answer is that it just makes the document look fuller, it goes.
Every document is shaped by transport managers and compliance specialists with more than 20 years of experience, including DVSA investigations, Public Inquiries and Traffic Commissioner hearings.
Get a quoteNo statute prescribes one. The contents are driven by your operator licence undertakings, health and safety duties and the rules your fleet works under, which is why two operators' handbooks should never be identical.
Long enough to cover the sections above for your fleet and short enough to be read: for most operators that lands between 30 and 50 pages. Anything much longer usually contains legislation or HR material that belongs elsewhere.
They can, if the document clearly separates the rules that differ, especially drivers' hours and tachograph requirements. Where the fleets differ substantially, separate handbooks are safer than a maze of exceptions.
The core is common, but sector sections change materially: waste fleets need duty of care paperwork, construction fleets need CLOCS and site rules, London fleets need DVS, and refrigerated fleets need temperature record procedures.
No statute requires a signature, but a signed and dated acknowledgement for each driver and each version is what turns the handbook into evidence of instruction. Without it you can show the document existed, but not that any driver received it.
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