How Chevin Fleet Solutions can assist with your VOSA compliance

Using RoadBASE® and FleetWave® to Maintain Road Worthiness

Chevin have recently concluded initial discussions with VOSA to identify and clarify how electronic records can be used to provide compliance with the VOSA "Guide to Maintaining Road Worthiness".

Essentially, the VOSA guidelines allow for data to be held electronically subject to a small number of provisions:

• Paper copy required
  It is not essential to keep original paper records, however it must be possible to produce paper records from any electronic system (For example in the case of a Public Inquiry, electronic systems are not permissable and any evidence must be paper based).
• Availability
  Maintenance and associated records must be retained for a minimum of 15 months
• Tamper-proof Audit Trail
  Any system must be demonstrably tamper-proof, and must provide a printable audit trail to show the end-to-end steps undertaken following, for example, a Driver Defect Report
• Availability of a 6 month inspection/service plan
  Please note that it is NOT necessary for this to be in a wall-planner format

OCRS = Operator Compliant Risk Score

VOSA have implemented a new risk-based scoring system, to enable effective targeting of VOSA resource against those operators that represent the highest risk. A risk score is generated either predictively (for new operators, based on fleet size, vehicle ages, o-licence type, etc.) or historically (based on test histories, road side incidents, etc). An operators risk score can be obtained by contacting VOSA via the Swansea call centre.

Factors that will influence your OCRS include:

• Vehicle defects found and prohibitions history (note that defects found at roadside checks are scored more highly than defects found at test)
• Test failure
  Any vehicles that fail their annual test will be scored down (as this is indicative of a failure in the maintenance process - even if outsourced)
• Test passes
  Vehicle passing annual inspection receive a positive score
• Roadside passes
  Vehicles passing roadside inspections receive a positive score

NOTE: It is worth noting that where maintenance is outsourced, you may be unaware of Test Failures (if your maintenance provider corrects the defects and retests), however these failures will still affect your scoring. As a result it is worthwhile requesting regular risk score reports from VOSA to identify if this is an issue.

Daily Driver Inspections

Whilst not a requirement of VOSA, the need for Drivers to record Daily Driver Inspections, even when no defects are found (otherwise known as nil-defect reporting), is seen as best-practice.

Please be aware that Chevin offer a PDA based Driver Daily Inspection facility whereby drivers can carry out and report daily inspections via the PDA, with real-time feedback to the transport manager of defects found. Our latest development also provides for a DO NOT DRIVE facility when defects are reported (until the Defect has been reviewed by a responsible person).

Finbarr Stewart, Project Manager