What a PMI inspection must cover

"PMI" - preventative maintenance inspection - is industry shorthand. It appears nowhere in DVSA's Guide to maintaining roadworthiness, which calls the same job a safety inspection throughout. Use whichever word your workshop uses; from here on this page uses DVSA's, because that is the term you will be matching against when the guide is quoted back at you.

The question of what a safety inspection must cover is really two questions, and only one of them gets answered by an item list. The first is what the inspection itself has to look at, which the guide covers briefly before pointing at a separate publication for the detail. The second is what the record has to show - and that is the one that decides outcomes, because nobody assessing your compliance was standing in the workshop. They read the report. The report is the evidence that the inspection happened, that it covered what it should have, and that the vehicle was fit to go back out.

Be careful with the word "must" here, because the guide is not consistent about it. Several things around the safety inspection report are stated as hard obligations, and three of them frame everything else: a report must be completed for each safety inspection of every vehicle and trailer; it must be fully completed and the vehicle declared roadworthy before it returns to service; and the records must be kept for at least 15 months. The list of fields that report should contain is a different kind of statement - DVSA introduces it as the minimum it expects to see, not as a schedule of separately legislated line items. That distinction is worth holding onto, and the section below on the guide's two lists sets out why.

What the record must show

Section 4.4, "Safety inspection report forms", is the section specifically about the report. It states the underlying obligation flatly:

"A safety inspection report must be completed for each safety inspection for both vehicles and trailers. If the safety inspection report is to be stored electronically, then the paper version does not need to be retained. This does not rule out the use of electronic devices (for example, tablets) in place of paper safety inspection reports."

Then the content list:

"Each report should show at least the following:

name of operator

date and ISO week of inspection

organisation conducting the inspection

address / location of inspection

vehicle identity (registration/trailer number)

make and model

odometer (mileage recorder) reading (if appropriate)

a list of all items to be inspected

an indication of the condition of each item inspected

details of any defects found

name and signature of inspector

details of any remedial/rectification or repair work and who carried out the work

named signed and dated statement declaring that all safety defects have been repaired satisfactorily and the vehicle is now in a safe and roadworthy condition"

Read the introduction as carefully as the bullets, because "should show at least" is doing two jobs. The "at least" makes this a floor rather than a specification - a longer report is not a wrong one. And "should" places it in the guide's best-practice tier rather than its legal-requirement tier, which section 1.1 defines explicitly: where the guide says you must, that is "a direct legal requirement set out in legislation"; where it says you should, that is best practice, "strongly recommended that you do unless you can demonstrate that an alternative approach provides a similar level of compliance".

A few entries are worth pulling out for closer attention. Take "a list of all items to be inspected" together with "an indication of the condition of each item inspected": between them, the report is expected to show the full scope and the outcome per item, not just the defects. A report that lists only what was wrong cannot distinguish a component that was checked and found sound from one that was never looked at. And the last bullet is not the same field as "details of any defects found": it is a named, signed and dated statement that the defects have been repaired satisfactorily and the vehicle is now in a safe and roadworthy condition. Recording a defect and declaring it fixed are two separate acts by two potentially different people, and the list asks for both.

The guide's two lists

The guide sets out the record's contents twice, in two sections, and the lists do not match. Section 1.5, "Key points of a good maintenance system", gives the shorter one:

"Any remedial work carried out as a result of safety inspections must be recorded. The safety inspection record should at least include:

name of operator

date of inspection

location of the inspection

the organisation who carried out the inspection

vehicle identity (registration mark/trailer number)

make and model

odometer (mileage recorder) reading, if appropriate

a list of all the inspection manual items to be inspected

details of any defects

name of inspector

complete details of any repair work and who did it

a signed declaration that any defects have been repaired satisfactorily and the vehicle is now in a safe roadworthy condition"

Three things in the section 4.4 list are absent here: the ISO week of inspection, the indication of the condition of each item inspected, and the inspector's signature - section 1.5 asks only for the inspector's name. This page follows section 4.4, on the straightforward ground that 4.4 is the section about report forms and 1.5 is a summary of a good maintenance system as a whole. Build the report to 4.4 and you cover what 1.5 asks for as well: every field 1.5 names has a counterpart in the 4.4 list, and 4.4 adds three more. It does not work in reverse.

There is a second inconsistency layered on top of that, and it is better to know about it than to be surprised by it. Section 1.4 refers to the Section 1 items - which is where the 1.5 list sits - as mandatory:

"The safety inspection form can be any format as long as the mandatory items listed in Section 1 of this guide are included on the form."

But in both places where the list actually appears it is introduced with "should" - "should show at least" in 4.4, "should at least include" in 1.5. Under the guide's own convention in section 1.1, "should" is best practice, not a legal requirement, and the guide cites no legislation for any individual field. So the honest reading is that DVSA describes this as its expected minimum report content while calling it mandatory in passing. The practical answer is the same either way: build the report to the full section 4.4 list. Nothing on it is expensive to capture, and an argument about whether the ISO week is separately legislated is not one worth having with a Traffic Commissioner when the alternative was recording one extra piece of information.

Inspection scope

The guide states the scope of the inspection itself in section 1.4:

"The scope of the inspection should at least include all the items covered by the statutory annual test and employ the methods of assessment that are prescribed in the respective inspection manual."

Section 4.1 adds the calibration:

"It should be emphasised that the standards for the annual test are the minimum legal standards and should be used as guidance for the safety inspection."

So annual test scope is the floor for what gets looked at, and annual test standards are a floor for the condition you accept - used as guidance for the inspection rather than as the target to just clear. Section 4.4 also anticipates going wider than the test items: "Additional items may be included in the safety inspection, which may be non-testable items required for specific operations or local additional safety requirements, such as the Direct Vision Standards."

Note where the section 1.4 sentence points. The item-by-item standard is not in the Guide to maintaining roadworthiness at all - it is in "the respective inspection manual", which for lorries and trailers is the MOT inspection manual for HGVs, a separate DVSA publication on its own revision cycle. The current version took effect on 1 April 2026 and the publication was last updated on GOV.UK on 19 February 2026. DVSA's specimen safety inspection record carries an "IM Ref" column defined on the form as "for more details on each item listed, look under this reference number in the DVSA Inspection Manual", which is the same pointer expressed at form level.

The consequence for anyone maintaining a check sheet is that the item detail has a shelf life the guide does not have. Section 4.7 expects a person undertaking safety inspections to "possess a sound working knowledge of the relevant inspection manuals produced by DVSA". Check your item list against the current manual and date-stamp it with the version you checked it against, rather than trusting any static list - including ours.

Brake performance

Braking gets its own treatment in section 5.3 and its own page here; this is only what it means for the record. DVSA's position is that "there is an expectation that every safety inspection will include a brake performance assessment using either a roller brake test (RBT), a suitable electronic braking performance monitoring system (EBPMS) or a decelerometer with temperature readings". Three fields follow from that: the record "should indicate the date of the assessment, how the braking performance was assessed and whether the vehicle or trailer was laden".

For the methods, the evidence that goes with the record, the four-tests-a-year expectation, the 14-day RBT window and the risk assessment regime that applies when a laden test is not carried out, see braking performance assessment.

Defects, rectification and carried-forward work

The report is not finished when the defects are listed. Section 4.4 is unambiguous about the end state:

"Safety inspection reports must be fully completed, and the vehicle declared roadworthy before it returns to service."

That is one of the genuine musts, and it governs everything else in this section. It also means the rectification half of the record - the details of any remedial work and who carried it out, and the named, signed, dated declaration - is not paperwork that catches up later. It is the condition on the vehicle going back out.

Within that, the guide expressly contemplates work that does not get done today:

"The report may contain details of any work to be carried forward. In particular, further checks may be needed on certain items deemed likely to deteriorate during service and make the vehicle unroadworthy before the next scheduled inspection or routine service."

Note what carrying forward is and is not. Both clauses are permissive - "may contain", "may be needed" - so this is a recognised, documented part of the regime rather than a workaround, but it is not a requirement to use and there is no prescribed format for it. And it does not touch the obligation above: a defect that makes the vehicle unroadworthy now cannot be carried forward, because the vehicle has to be declared roadworthy before it returns to service. What gets carried forward is monitoring - an item that is serviceable today and may not be by the next inspection. DVSA's own specimen HGV form expresses exactly that at field level, with a serviceable code of "Monitor (possible maintenance required before next SI)".

Two more section 4.4 obligations attach at the point the vehicle goes back to work. The completed record has to reach the operator: "The transport manager, responsible person or delegated individual must have access to the completed safety inspection sheet or electronic record." And where the work is contracted out, the guide expects the record to be provided or available before the vehicle returns to service, with a fallback that is itself a must - "exceptionally where it is not possible to provide the record immediately, the contractor must supply written evidence that the vehicle is declared roadworthy". A vehicle back in service on a verbal assurance from the garage is outside that.

Keeping the records

Retention is a must, and the period is 15 months:

"Safety inspection and repair work records, whether undertaken by operators or contracted out, must be kept for at least 15 months as part of a vehicle's maintenance history."

That obligation follows the record, not the vehicle. Records of safety inspections must be kept for at least 15 months for all vehicles, and this "includes vehicles that have been removed from the operator licence or have been sold or otherwise disposed of". Selling a unit does not close out its file.

Electronic records are acceptable - the guide's general principle is that they are, "provided that they contain the essential information that can be made available for examination" - and section 4.4 confirms that where the report is stored electronically, the paper version does not need to be retained. Section 4.6 says the same of the checklist: where the record is stored digitally, the checklist used for the inspection does not need to be kept.

Section 4.6 then sets out what a computerised system is expected to do, in a list it introduces as "Important features of a computerised system". Read the modality inside that list, because it is mixed. Most of the items are features - instant access to results and reports, hard copies on request, a compliance dashboard, data protection compliance, back-up and disaster recovery. Three are phrased as requirements:

it must be tamper proof (for example, records cannot be changed at a later date)

it must be clear what's been checked and by whom

there must be a clear end-to-end audit trail

Those three are the ones to treat as hard. Alongside them, records stored digitally must be tamper-proof and capable of producing hard copy information if required, and "Computer records must contain the same information as any comparable manual form" - so going electronic changes the medium, not the content list in section 4.4.

One requirement in section 4.6 is easy to overlook because it is organisational rather than technical:

"The operator must have a plan in place to ensure the system can be accessed by sufficient delegated people to maintain effective management control in the event of staff absence."

A system only one person can get into does not meet that, however good its audit trail. And none of it shifts responsibility: the guide is repeatedly explicit that it is ultimately the operator's responsibility to make sure any computerised maintenance system used meets the requirements of the operator licence.

The form itself

There is no mandatory form. Section 1.4: "The safety inspection form can be any format as long as the mandatory items listed in Section 1 of this guide are included on the form." DVSA publishes a specimen - Annex 4a, the example safety inspection record for HGVs and trailers - but it is an example, not a prescribed document, and an in-house sheet or a screen in a maintenance system is equally acceptable provided the required items are on it.

What the specimen is useful for is structure. It shows one way DVSA itself lays the pieces out: header identity fields, a serviceable code per item, a section for the braking performance assessment, a comments section for faults found, an action-taken section, and a signed declaration at the end. If you are building or reviewing your own sheet, that layout is a reasonable model to work against.