Noted on 10 Nov 2026

This week police forces and the Motor Insurers' Bureau are running Operation Drive Insured, their annual week of checks for uninsured drivers. MIB reckons about 335,000 people are driving uninsured on UK roads on any given day, and last year's week ended with 4,654 vehicles seized.

The obvious case is someone who never bought a policy. MIB's own guidance also covers a less obvious one: if your policy only covers social use and you drive your own car to a meeting, a site visit or a patient's home, you may be driving uninsured too. Using a car for work can need commuting or business cover, and plenty of people don't know which they've got.

For an organisation, that's the grey fleet. HSE's guidance says health and safety law applies to staff driving their own cars for work in the same way as it does to company vehicles, and puts making sure licences, insurance and MOTs are up to date on the employer's list.

What strikes me is how lopsided the paperwork usually is. Every business mile in a member of staff's car gets claimed, approved and paid (at 55p a mile now), so the organisation knows exactly when and where each trip happened. Whether the car was insured for that trip is often checked once a year from a certificate someone uploaded, on a policy that can change at every renewal.

A pool car is much simpler on this one point. It sits on a single policy the organisation holds itself, so whether the driver is covered for the journey has one answer, and the fleet team already knows it. It's a cost that rarely shows up when grey fleet mileage is compared with running pool cars, and I think it should.

For fleet and travel managers: how do you check that staff driving their own cars for work are actually insured for it, and how often?