Palletised goods are the bread and butter of general haulage - and one of the most common load security failures DVSA finds at the roadside. The failure is nearly always the same: the pallet was strapped down, but the load was never secured to the pallet. The government’s load securing guidance for HGVs is unambiguous on the point, and the rest of its pallet guidance flows from that single principle.
You must secure the load to the pallet to form a single unit before loading the pallet onto the vehicle. Securing the pallet to the vehicle by itself is not enough. The guidance names the methods: shrink wrapping, banding or strapping. Bulk bags and flexible intermediate bulk containers can be secured to pallets with suitable sheets or nets, or an empty pallet or other rigid cover over the bag secured with lashing straps. And the reason is spelled out: the load must not be able to slide on the pallet - if the load moves on the pallet, the restraint system for that pallet and those around it could fail. A beautifully lashed pallet with an unsecured load skating on top of it is a failure waiting for the first roundabout.
The same unitising principle runs through the guidance’s treatment of specific products. Construction products on pallets must be secured to the pallet to form a single unit before the entire unit is secured to the vehicle. Barrels and kegs should be shrink-wrapped or banded to a pallet as a single unit. Where lashing straps are used to create a rear bulkhead, the lashings must go round the load and attach to the vehicle chassis - never under the base of a pallet, because the pallet then takes forces it was never designed to hold.
Once on the vehicle, the guidance treats pallet condition as a loading decision: check pallets for damage or signs of weakness before loading, and do not accept them if they may not be strong enough to hold their load. Pallets come in enough sizes and weights that a full positive fit inside the vehicle is not always possible - so gaps must be managed. Spaces can be filled with packing material, or extra lashings used. On van-bodied vehicles, pallets must be restrained with lashings wherever there are spaces between the pallets themselves, between pallets and the vehicle sides, or between pallets and the headboard; where lashings cannot be used, the spaces must be filled with packing material or dunnage to stop movement. Weight distribution gets its own instruction: load pallets as close to each other as possible along the vehicle’s longitudinal centre line when the load space is not fully used or weight distribution is a concern.
Stacked palletised loads get structural rules. The pallets on the lower layer must be strong and level enough to fully support the weight above; heavy pallets never go on top of light ones; and each stack must be stable without lashings when loaded - straps are restraint, not scaffolding. The weight calculation changes too: use the weight of the stack, not the individual pallet, when choosing the securing method. Two stacked 300kg pallets must be secured as if they were a single 600kg pallet.
The pallet rules fail in practice for predictable reasons: the sender unitised badly and the driver loaded anyway; the gaps were left because filling them takes ten minutes nobody scheduled; the stack was strapped by feel rather than by total weight. Each is a process fix - reject poorly unitised pallets at the bay, keep dunnage and packing material on the vehicle, brief drivers on the stack-weight rule. The guidance could not be clearer about the sequence: make the pallet and its load one thing first, then make that one thing immovable in the vehicle. Fleets that drill the sequence find their roadside conversations about load security get very short.
Unitising is done, most often, at the sender’s premises, and that creates a boundary problem every general haulier knows: the pallet arrives already wrapped, and whether the wrap genuinely makes load and pallet a single unit is invisible from the dock. The guidance’s instruction to check pallets for damage before loading and refuse weak ones extends logically to refusing badly unitised ones - a pallet whose shrink wrap is decorative rather than structural will fail the same way whether the failure happens on your trailer or the sender’s bay, but only one of those makes it your incident. Carriers who brief their customers on the unitising standard, and give drivers the authority to refuse pallets that do not meet it, prevent the argument rather than win it. The load that cannot be secured should not be loaded - and the pallet rules are how you know the difference.