Where employees and workers use their own vehicles for work-related purposes, their insurance needs to cover that. However, there’s a risk that delivery drivers in particular could be at risk of invalidating their insurance policies. What’s the problem?
If employees use their own vehicles for work-related business, such as driving work colleagues around or making client visits (but this doesn’t include commuting to their normal workplace), they need to ensure their vehicle is covered for business use. Likewise, if casual workers use their own vehicles for doing delivery or courier work, whether that’s delivering food or other goods, they must ensure their insurance policy covers “hire and reward” journeys.
Standard vehicle insurance policies don’t cover this. If the driver doesn’t have the appropriate vehicle insurance in place to cover the type of driving that they’re doing, they’re driving without insurance, which is a criminal offence, and they could be subject to penalty points on their driving licence and a fixed penalty fine. In addition, if they’re involved in an accident, as their policy will be invalidated, their claim for compensation will be rejected.
Whilst you may think appropriately insuring their vehicle isn’t your concern, that’s not necessarily the case. If the employee or worker has an accident whilst driving on work-related business or doing deliveries for you, an injured third party might look to you for compensation on the basis that their injuries (or car damage) were sustained as a result of the employee’s or worker’s negligence whilst that individual was acting in the course of their employment, and hence you are vicariously liable for those injuries (or car damage). This is much more likely to be happen if the driver turns out to be uninsured.
So, when asking employees to drive on work-related business or taking on workers to do deliveries using their own vehicles, do make it a requirement that their vehicle insurance policy covers business use and/or hire and reward journeys, and ask to see a copy of their insurance certificate confirming the appropriate level of cover. They can obtain business use cover as an add on to their standard vehicle insurance policy or they can purchase specific courier insurance (ideally also including goods in transit cover where they’re going to be delivering or collecting goods while working as a courier).