Posted By Pete Longworth
As far as I am aware there is no legal requirement for a licence for an FLT unless you are going to drive it on the public highway. Many employers operate their own system of authorisations and standards of training eg trained by an organisation accredited to RTITB standards. There is also the NORS scheme for FLT training but any qualification arising from these does not constitute an FLT licence, it is merely an indication that an individual has been trained to a certain standard.
"HSG 6 - Safety in working with lift trucks" gives advice on authorisations but it only says that employers SHOULD give written authorisation to properly trained employees, it doesn't say that this would be a firm legal requirement.

Posted By andrew morris
Please be careful about the interpretation of the above advice.

When you say pedestrian flt do you mean an actual fork lift truck or a pallet truck - there is a slight difference, assuming flt

Fork Lift Truck drivers must have been adequately trained and the company can prove their capability. You are unable to prove competancy without doing this. If you run an inhouse one then it needs to follow a documented system with a sylabus and tests. I visited hundreds of premises and never seen a good internal training scheme that wasn't run by an accredited instructor. Alternatively you can get an external course which ticks all the boxes if the instructor is RTITB/ITSAR/etc. registered.

See the HSE website:
http://www.hse.gov.uk/wo...lacetransport/faq.htm#a1