Hiring warehouse and forklift staff

There is no such thing as a forklift licence

The DVLA issues nothing for a forklift. What a candidate holds is a certificate of basic training from a private provider, and that is a different thing from a licence in every way that matters to you.

It also means there is no legal period after which it expires. Three to five years is what HSE suggests an employer may sensibly decide, which is where the three year rule everybody repeats comes from. It is a habit, not a rule. A certificate older than three years is not automatically invalid, and you are still entitled to refuse it.

The whole of this is written out for candidates at forklift tickets, including the categories, which is the part that costs people a morning.

The duty does not transfer with the card

Regulation 9 of PUWER 1998 puts the duty on the employer to ensure that anybody using work equipment has received adequate training. A certificate in somebody's wallet is evidence towards discharging that duty. It is not the duty discharged.

In practice that means a familiarisation on your trucks, your racking and your aisles, whatever they arrive holding. A site that waves somebody straight on because they produced a card is telling you something about the site.

The categories are separate. A counterbalance certificate does not cover a reach truck. It is the commonest bad ask in a warehouse and it is always made kindly and in passing, usually at half past five in the morning.

The four things the advert has to answer

Is it chilled, frozen or ambient. Minus twenty is a different job. Somebody who has done it knows exactly what they are agreeing to and somebody who has not should find out from the advert rather than on the first morning.

What the hours and the pattern are. Twilight, nights and four on four off suit completely different lives.

Whether there is a pick rate. Somebody who has worked to a rate wants the number. Somebody who has not deserves to be told there is one.

How heavy the lifting is, in kilograms. "Lifting up to 25kg repeatedly through a shift" is a fact somebody can judge for themselves. "Must be physically fit" is not a description of any task, it is a description of a person, and it is one of the phrases this board holds under the Equality Act because it screens out disabled applicants without meaning to. See advert wording.

Cold, and what the law actually says about it

There is no legal minimum temperature, which surprises people on both sides. What there is instead is a duty to assess the risk and act on it, and in a cold store that means clothing, breaks and time limits rather than a number on a thermometer.

Protective clothing needed for the work is the employer's to provide, free. The rule is the same as for a hard hat. An agency or an employer charging for it, or deducting for it, has got that wrong.

Targets, and the one that becomes your problem

Setting a rate is lawful and normal. A rate that can only be met by skipping a check, cutting a break or lifting badly is not a productivity measure, it is an instruction, and it lands on whoever set it.

Monitoring is allowed with limits. And a thing worth knowing before somebody asks you for it: the pick figures recorded against a worker's name are that worker's personal data, and they can ask for a copy. Most do not know that. The ones who do tend to ask the week before a performance conversation rather than after it.

What we will not pretend

We do not have a database of vetted warehouse staff sitting ready, and any board of our age that says it does is describing an ambition. What we have is a board, the rules above enforced on the adverts, and an agency side that says plainly which work it will and will not take.

If the honest answer to your vacancy is that you are two pounds an hour under the site down the road, we will tell you that rather than take the money and let the advert sit there.

Ready to write the advert

Our software reads it before it publishes and tells you which of the questions above it has not answered. That is advice, never a refusal: the advert goes live either way and the money is yours to spend. Post a job, or read what it costs first.

The other guide is Hiring a Class 1 or Class 2 driver.