OCRS tracking for coach and bus operators. Know your score before the report lands.

Your OCRS decides how likely DVSA is to pull your coaches in at the roadside. DVSA’s OCRS guidance is plain about it: the higher the score, the more likely your vehicles get inspected. It is easy to only look at it when someone pulls DVSA’s report, and by then a bad encounter has already done its damage. PSVault keeps its own running reckoning in between, so you know where you stand on any given morning.

How the score works

OCRS is worked out per operator licence, not per vehicle. There are three scores: roadworthiness, traffic and a combined one. Points come from roadside checks, MOT results, desk-based assessments and DVSA site visits. A check where nothing is found counts as a clear event and pulls the score down.

The base score is your points divided by your number of events, over a rolling three years. Older events count for less. Points in year one count in full, year two at 0.75 and year three at 0.5, and anything over three years old drops out. That last part catches people. When a run of clean checks from three years ago falls off the end, your score can go up even though nothing new has gone wrong.

For roadworthiness, a score of 10 or below is green, 10.01 to 25 is amber and more than 25 is red. The points per defect depend on the category, and S marked defects carry double:

DVSA can change the points, weightings and band limits whenever it needs to. Our guide to OCRS explained covers the rest of the scoring, including traffic offences.

Entering a roadside encounter

When a driver comes back with a PG35EC, the office enters it by hand on the day. PSVault records the checks that were done, any notices issued, each defect with its inspection manual reference and OCRS category, any offences, and the advisories. Advisories are not in DVSA’s points table, but an advisory left alone can turn into next month’s prohibition, so they are worth keeping.

A defect found at the roadside also feeds missed defect tracking. If it was something a driver should spot, PSVault looks back at the walkarounds on that vehicle and records each one that marked the item OK against that driver. A roadside prohibition for a tyre that three drivers passed is a training problem as much as a maintenance one.

If the encounter ended in a PG9, record it as a prohibition and it gets its own prohibition investigation, so the paperwork and the follow-up live in one place.

PSVault’s own running score

DVSA re-scores every day, but you only see it when someone logs in and pulls the report. PSVault keeps a reckoning of its own from the encounters you enter, MOT results and DVSA’s encounter reports, using DVSA’s published points and weightings. It shows today’s score beside the figure from DVSA’s last report and explains the difference, whether that is a new encounter, an MOT result or an old event falling out of the three years.

PSVault’s figure is only as complete as the records behind it. If an encounter never gets entered, PSVault does not know about it. DVSA’s report is the official score. The point of the running reckoning is that a change should not come as a surprise.

Forecast and what if

Because PSVault knows when each event was recorded, it can tell you when each one changes weight or drops out, and forecast the score from there. It also answers the question every transport manager asks after a bad week: how many clean checks will it take to come down?

It works because the score is points divided by events. Every clear check adds one to the bottom of that sum without adding anything to the top, so the score falls. The what if runs that from today’s real position, with the year weightings applied, and tells you roughly how many clean encounters it takes to get back under the band line. It also shows the dates when old defects lose weight on their own.

How it feeds the self-check

Roadside prohibitions and S marks are part of what an examiner looks at in a maintenance investigation, and PSVault’s maintenance investigation self-check pulls in the prohibitions and S marks from the last three years. The OCRS screen tells you how DVSA sees you from the roadside. The self-check tells you how you would look if they came through the door.