Licences issued outside Great Britain
Whether to accept a licence issued outside Great Britain, what can and cannot be checked, and the 12-month entitlement flag.
A DVLA check code covers England, Scotland and Wales. No country outside Great Britain offers anything equivalent. That single fact shapes everything below, and it is why a foreign licence is handled differently rather than pretended to be the same.
Your firm decides which licences you accept
This is an insurance question before it is a software question: plenty of UK hire policies restrict or exclude foreign-licence holders, and that is a fact about your cover, not about KeyProof. Set your position in Settings, under Renter eligibility rules. There are three choices:
- GB licences only. The default. Every firm starts here.
- GB and EU or EEA licences.
- Worldwide, with a manual check by you at handover.
The renter is asked where their licence was issued as the very first licence question, so anyone you do not accept is told politely to contact you at the start, not after ten minutes of typing.
What is checked, and what is not
On a foreign licence KeyProof can establish two things honestly, and one it cannot:
- Who the person is, and that the document is genuine and belongs to them. This is the same identity check as any other hire.
- The details the renter declares: the issuing country, the licence number, and the issue and expiry dates.
- Driving entitlement is not checked against any authority, because outside GB there is no authority to check it against. Your physical inspection of the licence at handover is the entitlement check.
The record says exactly that, in those words, so an insurer reading it later knows precisely what they have. A foreign licence is never described on a KeyProof record as verified, DVLA-checked, or confirmed.
The 12-month question
Here is the risk nobody in this trade asks about. A licence can be entirely genuine, in date, and still belong to somebody who is no longer entitled to drive here, because the clock on driving in GB on a foreign licence has run out.
So the check-in asks two more things: whether they live here or are visiting, and the date they became resident or last entered the country. KeyProof does the arithmetic and flags a hire where the 12-month window looks to have passed. An EU or EEA licence holder living here is generally able to continue, so is not flagged.
This is a flag based on what the renter told you, not a check against anyone's records. They could give the wrong date. Treat it as a prompt to look harder at the licence in your hand, never as a clearance, and never as a reason to skip the physical inspection.
At handover
On a foreign-licence hire, inspect the physical licence and mark it inspected on the booking. That action is written to the record in full: that you matched the licence to the holder at handover, and that entitlement was not checked against an issuing authority because no such service exists outside GB.