Two cities, one licence
Nottingham and Derby share a metropolitan area of more than one and a half million people, joined by the A52, and a vehicle based in one city can easily spend its week working in both. Wherever it works, the operator licence carries the same obligation: inspect at the stated intervals and keep the vehicle roadworthy in between. DVSA judges how well that is done through roadside checks, annual test results and your OCRS score, and a run of missed or poor inspections can put the licence itself at risk.
Our inspection standard
We inspect to the standards DVSA publishes, including the Guide to Maintaining Roadworthiness and the HGV inspection manual. Brake performance is assessed on every visit, and the inspection also covers steering and suspension, tyres, wheels and fixings, lamps and electrics, the chassis, body and coupling gear, the cab, mirrors and seat belts, and anything leaking or smoking. Defects are written up, repaired and checked again before the vehicle is signed off, so the inspection sheet you file matches the vehicle that drives out of the workshop.
City wear shows up at inspection
Vehicles that work Nottingham's streets come in with a recognisable set of defects. Lamps and wiring take knocks in tight loading areas, tyres pick up kerb damage, steering joints and suspension bushes wear under constant turning, and air leaks develop in pipework and couplings. Mirrors, wipers, bodywork and curtains suffer too. None of these is difficult to fix on a ramp; all of them are costly to discover at a roadside check.
Preparing for the annual test
The aim of test preparation is simple: the vehicle should go to the test centre ready to pass, not to find out what is wrong with it. We go over it with a tester's eye, fix the items that commonly fail, and hand it back ready. If one of your vehicles has already failed, we can put the failure items right, prepare it for the retest and look at why the regular inspections missed them.
Daily checks feed the system
A driver's walkaround catches what has gone wrong since yesterday, and the PMI catches the gradual wear. When walkaround sheets keep reporting the same defect, the interval or the maintenance plan may need adjusting, and we will tell you when we see it.
Getting the dates right
Inspections can be combined with servicing when the two fall close together, so a vehicle makes one trip out of Nottingham rather than two, and fleets on a maintenance contract have their inspection calendar planned in advance. To book, ring 01332 916028 with the registration and the due date. The workshop takes planned work Monday to Friday, 07:30 to 17:00.
