DVSA maintenance investigation self-check for goods operators. Sit the visit before the examiner arrives.

When DVSA opens a maintenance investigation, an examiner sits in your office with the maintenance files, walks the yard, puts a few lorries and trailers over the pit, and writes up how you keep the fleet roadworthy. If it goes badly, the report goes to the traffic commissioner. Run the self-check first and the handful of things worth fixing have already turned up, most of them already put right, before anyone from DVSA opens a file.

What the examiner works through

DVSA publishes its maintenance investigation questions on GOV.UK for operators in England, Scotland and Wales. They start with the operator’s legal entity and the condition of the vehicles at the fleet check, then move through the operating centre, inspection and maintenance records, driver defect reporting, facilities, emissions, wheel and tyre management, prohibitions, security, earlier shortcomings and undertakings, and the transport manager. Section 9 is where a goods operator’s visit differs. For HGVs it covers load security: whether restraints are checked and fit for purpose, and whether drivers and loaders are trained to use them.

Most questions end in one of four outcomes: satisfactory, mostly satisfactory, unsatisfactory, or report to traffic commissioners. A few use their own wording. Anything below satisfactory needs an explanation from you, and our guide to the maintenance investigation for goods vehicle operators takes the sections one at a time.

Your records, asked the same questions

HGVault runs DVSA’s question set in its HGV form, with the examiner’s outcomes and codes. For each question it fills in what your records show, suggests an outcome and says why. The office agrees with it or changes it, writes its own assessment and signs the self-check. If the transport manager thinks a suggestion is harsh, they change it and note the reason, which is the kind of thinking an examiner likes to see written down anyway.

What it fills in from the records

• Sheets left incomplete. Every safety inspection goes through the same checks a technician meets before signing, so a brake test with no printout, or a wheel taken off with no re-torque booked, comes up here.
• Late inspections by ISO week, and whether a VOR record covered the lorry or trailer while it was overdue.
• The forward planner. The guidance expects inspections, annual tests and calibration dates to be planned at least six months ahead, and HGVault checks that yours is.
• Walkarounds, nil defect reports included, set against what the workshop keeps finding at inspection.
• Wheel security and tyres, from re-torques done and missed to tyre ages, tread and pressures on the tyre register.
• Annual test results. The examiner looks at your final fail rate, with PRS taken out, against the national average. With DVSA’s MOT history switched on, each lorry’s tests arrive by themselves.
• Prohibitions and S marks across the three years of encounters and tests the examiner samples, from your PG9 records.
• Outside workshops. Inspections recorded from a contractor’s report count like your own, with the questions you took back to them, answered or still waiting.

Some goods questions sit outside the workshop altogether. Load security is the obvious one: the risk assessments, the loading plans, the straps, bars and nets, and the training given to drivers and loaders. Site security is another. HGVault does not pretend to know about those. It puts the question in front of the office with a note of what the examiner will want to see, and the answer is yours to write.

A fleet that has no workshop and contracts all its maintenance out gets the same checks, worded for that: the written agreement with each contractor, the records they hand back, and how you keep an eye on the quality of their work.

Your own fleet check

The examiner looks at vehicles as well as paper, and the guidance lets them include trailers in the fleet check, the operator’s own and third-party ones. It gives a recommended minimum by fleet size:

HGVault picks the vehicles to look at the way the guidance describes, and the office records what an examiner would have found on each. Far better that you find the perished air line on the back of the fridge trailer this afternoon.

Every shortfall gets a name against it

Each finding can become an action with an owner, a due date and a status, and open actions sit on the dashboard where the office sees them every morning. The next self-check starts by looking back at the last one’s actions, so you can see what was closed and what slid. Each question keeps its outcome from every finished run, which builds a trend quarter by quarter. If driver defect reporting was mostly satisfactory in spring and satisfactory by autumn, it shows. Once a quarter is the rhythm it is built for.

Between self-checks, every night

DVSA readiness looks over the same records every night: inspections late or missed, sheets left unsigned, brake performance not measured, faults a walkaround should have caught, checks done too fast or always clear, a lorry used with a defect reported against it, prohibitions, OCRS heading for amber or red, the same fault over and over, re-torques, tyres, recalls, tools out of calibration, MOT, tachograph, tax and tail lift LOLER dates, and the goods vehicle operator licence. Each item is tied to the question it would hit, shows the worst that question allows, and takes an owner and a due date. The PI preparation pack prints where you stand and how that has moved over 6, 12 or 24 months.

Earned recognition figures

If you are weighing up DVSA’s earned recognition scheme, the Earned recognition page works out DVSA’s five maintenance KPIs from the records you keep, for each 4-week period, with the exceptions behind every figure and room for your notes. It is there to get you ready for the scheme. HGVault is not a DVSA validated system, and the page says so.

The printed self-check

The self-check prints as a PDF in the report’s own layout and codes. A transport consultant with a read-only login can open it, look through the evidence behind each answer and print it, with no way of changing anything. If DVSA does write, you can show what you checked, what you found and what you did about it.

What it cannot do

It only knows what it is told. Inspections that stay on paper, or a defect fixed with nothing written down, leave holes it cannot see. It cannot promise an outcome either. The examiner forms their own view, and DVSA has not approved or endorsed HGVault. What you get is the examiner’s questions asked of your own records while there is still time to act on the answers.