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Information For New Operators: Part 4 - OCRS, what you need to know.

What is OCRS?

OCRS is your Operator Compliance Risk Score and is a scoring system used by VOSA to target the operators that are less likely to be compliant with the legislation. You may have wondered after reading our previous emails how VOSA target and catch the bad guys, how they utilise their resources to go after disreputable operators rather than the wasting their time checking on the good ones? The answer is, they use the OCRS system.

How does OCRS work?

OCRS works by assigning a score to your operator’s licence, this score is put together from all recorded maintenance, defect, penalties issued and records on your vehicles, including but not limited to:-

• Annual & first test data
• Roadside inspection data
• Defect data
• Fixed penalties issued
• PLS records (including previous convictions and roadside inspection data)

All the above information is kept by VOSA and is recorded against your operator’s licence.

Your OCRS is checked by VOSA examiners by entering your vehicle registration number into a handheld device as you approach a roadside inspection. If you have a low score, they will probably let you drive by, if you have a medium to high score, it is likely they will call you in for inspection. Also operators with higher scores are more likely to be visited by a VOSA inspector for a site inspection.

You may be thinking that when you get an operators licence, your score starts off at zero. Unfortunately, this is not true. New operators are assigned a score based on similar companies with similar circumstances and you are assigned an average score, at least until your vehicles have been through an annual check that would give VOSA some data on the upkeep of your vehicles.

In this previous article we mentioned that failing a roadside inspection is bad news for the operator licence holder. This is because anything recorded in relation to vehicle maintenance is kept for a two year period and will affect the OCRS of all vehicles on that licence. If defects are found on a vehicle during an inspection or someone driving your vehicle is awarded a graduated fixed penalty then the likelihood of being inspected in the future has increased for all your vehicles, because that incident will affect your OCRS score for two years!

This is why making sure your vehicles are maintained properly and pre-use inspections are carried out is so vitally important.

Systems such as our Nil-Defect reporting, tachograph analysis, and forward planning make it easy to ensure your vehicles are up to scratch and with our on-going support you can operate your vehicles worry free.

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Reader Comments

Sal	Actually, VOSA changed the OCRS scoring system a bit ago. Making more people have a bad score.
OLMC	You can find details about this in one of our previous news articles. here.