Taxi Driver Online

Dear Operator,

This email is being sent to all transport operators on the Dynamic Purchasing Scheme (DPS), and its contents in no way implies any wrongdoing on behalf of your company in particular.

When School Transport badges are requested for an individual, completion of an online self-disclosure form indicates whether the applicant has lived outside the UK for a period of six months or more during the preceding five years. Those who have lived outside the UK are asked to provide a police certificate of good conduct from the country or countries where they have resided. The certificate must be dated after the applicant’s arrival in the UK.

In recent months we have received a significant number of police certificates of good conduct that have been fraudulently altered, with both text and photographs having been changed.

Each fraudulent certificate that we have identified has been investigated (with consideration for referral to Police), and the operators concerned have been made aware of the investigation and also the compliance action resulting from it.
The action taken has included the termination of all the contractors contracts, charging the contractor any costs in getting the contracts covered and permanent removal of the company from the DPS.

The applicant named on the fraudulent certificate was refused the issue of a school transport badge.


The purpose of this email is to ask for vigilance when accepting and forwarding certificates of good conduct to us. The following may help to identify fraudulent documents.

Insist on seeing original colour documents where at all possible rather than an emailed attachment. Look for signs of alteration including use of correction fluid, overtyping and instances where one photograph has been exchanged for another, and the current photograph no longer has the ink stamp that is still on the certificate but stops at the edges of the ‘new’ photograph.

Question the person presenting the certificate, asking who has actually applied for it and by what means it has come into their possession. Please think of the information that you would be aware of if it was your certificate.

Some countries (such as Pakistan and Bangladesh), now put QR codes on their certificates. These can be read very easily using a free app on your mobile phone, and will quickly confirm a certificate’s authenticity. Going forward we will only accept emailed colour certificates from these counties, and they must have the QR code present.

Please do all that you can to authenticate police certificates, and be prepared to detail what actions you have taken to verify a document should it be submitted to us and subsequently identified as not being genuine.

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Of all the things ive lost, i miss my mind the most