Up to a third of customers who use software are failing to react to potential issues the systems highlights.

CFC Solutions’ Licence Link systems sends an e-mail warning if there is a driving licence issue with registered drivers. However, according to the company around one in three fleets do not always ‘click through’ to find out details.

Neville Briggs (Inset), managing director, said: ‘These alerts can range from the mundane, such as a driver who has incorrectly entered his or her driving licence number onto the system, to significant changes such as licences being withdrawn.

‘However, what we are finding is that a sizeable minority of fleets sometimes or always ignore these warnings. We know this because we can tell from the system whether they click through to gain further details.’

Briggs suspects that these fleets feel that having driving licence checking software in place is essentially a ‘box ticking’ exercise and in itself was sufficient to fulfil their duty of care responsibilities.

He added: ‘There could be all kinds of reasons for not clicking through – ranging from simply being very busy and forgetting to follow it up through to thinking it unimportant.

‘Whatever the reason, there is every chance that doing nothing when they receive an alert it will mean that they are no longer compliant with their own risk management policy.’

He claimed that it would be difficult to defend in duty of care terms an accident if it involved a driver whose alert had been ignored.