What Chain of Responsibility is
Chain of Responsibility (CoR) is the principle, embedded in the Heavy Vehicle National Law (HVNL), that safety duties in heavy vehicle transport sit with every party who influences the task, not just the driver. Employers, operators, schedulers, consignors and consignees, packers, loaders and load managers each hold a primary duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the safety of their transport activities.
The National Heavy Vehicle Regulator (NHVR) administers the HVNL in participating states and territories; Western Australia and the Northern Territory operate their own arrangements. If heavy vehicles move goods for you, into you or out of you, assume the chain includes you and verify from there. The NHVR’s own guidance and gap-assessment material is the canonical starting point - this guide focuses on the maintenance and records slice of the duty.
Where maintenance fits in CoR
Vehicle standards and roadworthiness are one of the core risk areas CoR duties cover, alongside fatigue, speed, mass and load restraint. In practice, the maintenance slice of the duty comes down to a working loop:
- Check - vehicles are inspected before use, and faults have a way to surface (daily checks, scheduled inspections).
- Report - identified defects are recorded, with severity and the decision that followed (repair, restrict, ground).
- Fix - defects flow into repair work and scheduled servicing happens when due, by time or by odometer.
- Prove - each step above leaves a dated, attributable record you can produce per vehicle, per period, on request.
An operation can be maintaining its fleet well and still fail the prove step because the evidence lives in cab consoles, text threads and a workshop whiteboard. CoR records exist to close that gap.
The records that matter
The record set most heavy vehicle operations maintain for the maintenance side of CoR:
- Daily / pre-trip inspection records - who checked which vehicle, when, and what they found. The truck & heavy vehicle pre-start checklist is the working document here.
- Defect reports and close-out- the trail from “fault found” to “fault fixed”, including decisions to keep a vehicle off the road.
- Periodic inspection records - structured inspections against vehicle standards, e.g. the NHVR heavy vehicle inspection checklist.
- Service and repair history - scheduled servicing by date or odometer, parts and work performed, per vehicle.
- Load restraint checks - evidence loads are restrained to standard before departure: load restraint checklist.
- Fatigue records - where applicable, work diaries and fatigue management evidence: driver’s work diary (NHVR) and the fatigue management plan.
- Policy and system documents - the written system that ties it together: CoR policy template and the CoR checklist.
Retention periods vary by record type and jurisdiction - confirm current requirements with NHVR guidance, and keep digital history longer than the minimum since it costs nothing to do so.
Running CoR records digitally
Paper CoR systems fail at the same three points: checks get skipped when nobody is watching, defect reports go missing between the cab and the workshop, and producing records for a specific vehicle and date range takes days. A digital system closes each one:
- Drivers complete pre-start inspections on their phone against the specific vehicle, with photos, signatures and timestamps - and the record exists the moment the check does.
- Failed items raise work orders automatically, so the defect-to-fix trail is built into the workflow rather than reconstructed after the fact.
- Servicing is scheduled by date or meter reading, with overdue alerts before a vehicle quietly runs past its interval.
- Every record sits on the vehicle’s asset record, so producing a vehicle’s full history for a review is a filter and an export, not an archaeology project. See compliance features and fleet tracking.
The free CoR template stack
Every template below is free, PDF-ready and built for Australian operations. Start on paper if you need to - each page also shows how the same record runs digitally in MapTrack.
- Chain of Responsibility checklist - the party-by-party self-check of your CoR exposure.
- CoR policy template - the written system document.
- Truck & heavy vehicle pre-start checklist - the daily check.
- NHVR heavy vehicle inspection - the structured standards inspection.
- Load restraint checklist - restraint checks before departure.
- Driver’s work diary (NHVR) and fatigue management plan - the fatigue records.
