Ask the MAC – 27 Feb 2026

Turning a colour-blind eye 

Q) Can a driver who is colour blind hold an HGV licence and if they can, can you confirm if anything needs to be done if an HGV driver is colour blind?

A) Colour blindness does not disqualify a driver from holding a UK HGV licence, does not need to be reported to DVLA, and is not part of the mandatory Group 2 vision standards unless it is extremely severe and causes broader safety concerns.

When you look at the safety concerns, you would need to pay particular attention to the driver’s ability to distinguish traffic light positions, and also the recognition of key warning lights or signals that may come up on the dashboard, for example, red warning lights and amber or yellow warning lights. You might also want to consider other lights on the dashboard for example, lights on/off, fog lights and indicators.

Clean sweep

Q) We have recently purchased an 18t gully tanker. Do these types of vehicles need to go onto our operator licence? I am looking at Logistics UK’s 2026 Yearbook of Road Transport Law (page 18, definition 3) “vehicles fitted with machine, appliance, apparatus etc.”, section “d”. This is where our road sweepers come under, so am I right that the gully tankers come under the same definition?

A) It’s possible that the exemption may have applied previously, but once the regulations were amended in 2018, gully tankers did not meet the exemption requirements detailed in section 15 of Schedule 3 of The Goods Vehicles (Licensing of Operators) Regulations 1995, and are therefore in scope of operator licensing when used on the road to transport goods.

Gully suckers remove sludge/detritus by suction vacuum from culverts, drains, underground cavities etc, and transport what they have removed away. In principle, they are not much different to a milk tanker collecting milk from dairy farms – a tanker, fitted with a suction pump. They transport the sludge etc away on the road, and because of this, they are in scope of operator licensing.