Keeping tabs on inspection standards with Lloyd Morgan Group
Transport compliance and training provider Lloyd Morgan Group has issued advice on how fleet operators should handle changes to official manuals in order to ensure their inspection standards are up to date.
“The DVSA published revised HGV and PSV inspection manuals on 19 February this year,” said Glen Tapper, digital marketing lead at Lloyd Morgan Group.
“They took effect on 1 April 2026. The changes cover how a number of defects are described, defined and classified, in areas including tyres and wheel fixings, the speedometer, tachograph and speed limiter sections, and service brake operation. Section 74 was rewritten and renamed Other Dangerous Defects and Conditions, with new wording setting out what counts as a condition rather than a defect. A few months earlier, in November 2025, the DVSA had already reworked the Individual Vehicle Approval (IVA) inspection manual for N2 and N3 vehicles to account for blind spot information systems and new evidence requirements for couplings.
“None of this is unusual on its own. The manuals get revised most years, and the DVSA flags the changes clearly. There is a revision record at the front of each document and a black line in the margin wherever something has moved. The April 2026 manual even added a note to remind readers what that black line means.
“What is worth pausing on is the pace. Two revisions of the operating standard in nine months is a faster cycle than most workshops plan around, and it is not about to slow down. Vehicle technology keeps redefining what roadworthy means, from ADAS to electric drivetrains, and the manual has to keep up with it.”
The manual tells an examiner what to look for and how to grade what it finds, Glen explains.
“It tells your fitters, your inspectors and your drivers nothing at all, unless somebody in the business translates it for them. That translation step is where the risk sits, and it is easy to miss, because a manual update looks like an admin task. A bulletin arrives; someone reads it, files it and moves on. The document has been dealt with. Whether the people carrying out daily and periodic inspections have recalibrated what they are looking for is a different question, and it is the one that decides how the next annual test goes.
“The DVSA’s own figures sharpen the point. In the first quarter of 2025 to 2026, 10.4 per cent of HGVs failed their annual test at the first attempt. The agency’s consistent position is that many of those failures should have been picked up at the driver’s walkaround check, or before the vehicle was ever presented. A rewritten section is exactly where that gap opens up. A fitter working from an outdated sense of what counts as advisory and what counts as major can sign a vehicle off in good faith and still be wrong. Nobody is being careless. The reference point has moved.
“It is worth treating a manual revision as a briefing exercise rather than a reading exercise. That does not mean a full course every time a section is amended. It can be as simple as walking through the affected sections with whoever carries out your safety inspections, updating your PMI sheets and defect-grading criteria to match the current wording, and asking any outsourced maintenance provider to confirm they have done the same. What it should not be is an email sitting in an inbox until the next annual test throws up a surprise.”
Formal, accredited inspector training has a role here too, adds Glen – not as a box to tick when someone joins the business, but as a way of keeping a workshop’s judgement consistent while the standards it works to keep changing.
“A qualification earned several years ago against an older version of the manual is a good foundation. Foundations still need revisiting when the ground moves. Regular refreshers, whether delivered in-house or through an external provider, are what keep a team’s reading of acceptable in step with the DVSA’s rather than two revisions behind it.”
He concluded: “The pace of change is not the problem in itself. The DVSA revises its manuals to reflect evolving vehicle technology and to remove the vague wording that produces different outcomes at different test stations, and that is a reasonable aim. The work on the operator side is to close the loop. Read the update, work out what it actually changes for your fleet, and make sure that change reaches the people doing the inspecting, not just the person who filed the bulletin.”
