Every driver hopes never to need the rules for what to do after a collision. Every professional driver needs to know them anyway, because the legal duties at the roadside are strict, time-limited and largely independent of blame. Highway Code rules 286 to 289 set out the sequence, and for a commercial driver the stakes run higher: the procedure protects the driver, the load, the operator’s insurance position and, on the worst days, the evidence a court or a Traffic Commissioner will later examine.
The starting duty is absolute. If you are the driver of a motor vehicle involved on a road or other public place in a collision that causes damage or injury to any other person, vehicle, animal or property, you must stop and give your own and the vehicle owner’s name and address, and the registration number of the vehicle. The list of “animal” is specific: horse, cattle, ass, mule, sheep, pig, goat or dog. Two details catch people out. First, the duty attaches to damage to property and the named animals - clipping a wall or a dog in the road triggers it just as much as a vehicle-to-vehicle shunt. Second, you must stop, not just slow and assess: driving on because “it was only a scratch” is itself an offence.
Rule 286 adds a practical instruction alongside the legal one: switch off the engine and switch on the hazard warning lights. For a laden HGV the instinct to stay put in the cab is strong; the rule is to make the vehicle safe and visible, then deal with what follows.
If the collision caused injury or damage, you must produce your certificate of insurance to anyone with reasonable grounds for requiring it - in practice, the other party and any police officer present. There is a fallback for the driver who cannot produce it at the scene: report the collision to the police as soon as possible, and in any case within 24 hours, and produce the certificate within seven days. That seven-day production is at a police station you nominate. The 24-hour reporting duty is the one drivers most often breach, usually because they settled matters amicably at the roadside and saw no need to report. The rule does not care about the amicable settlement: no certificate produced at the scene means report within 24 hours.
Where the collision caused injury to another person, both duties apply at full strength: produce the insurance certificate to anyone with reasonable grounds, or report to police as soon as possible and within 24 hours and produce the certificate within seven days. Note what the rule does not say: it does not require injury to be serious. Any injury - the whiplash complaint, the cut hand - engages the reporting duty if insurance was not produced at the scene.
Damage-only collisions have their own reporting trigger. If you caused damage to another vehicle, property or a named animal and did not give your details at the time - the classic case is the unoccupied parked car or the fence with no owner present - you must report the collision to the police as soon as reasonably practicable, and in any case within 24 hours. The note on a windscreen does not replace the report; it is good practice alongside it, not instead of it.
Beyond the legal minimum, professional drivers carry employer instructions that typically go further: photograph the scene, the vehicles and any road markings before moving anything; take witness names and numbers; make no admission of liability - exchanging details is a duty, apportioning blame is not; and report the collision to the operator immediately, because the operator’s insurer usually imposes its own notification deadlines that can be shorter than the statutory ones. A driver who knows rules 286 to 289 cold and follows the employer’s scene procedure on top has done everything the law and the job can ask of the worst ten minutes in driving.
It is worth rehearsing the sequence before it is needed. A driver who has mentally walked through stop, hazard lights, exchange details, photograph, report will do it under stress; a driver reading the rules for the first time at a wet roadside will miss one. Operators should build the legal duties into induction training and refresh them, because the costs of a missed report fall on the driver personally.