What a lorry needs to deliver in London: the permit, the ban and the charges

Two London schemes stop lorries that every toll has been paid on. The HGV Safety Permit applies to vehicles over 12 tonnes gross weight across all of Greater London, 24 hours a day. The London Lorry Control Scheme restricts which roads vehicles over 18 tonnes may use from 9pm to 7am on weekdays and from 1pm Saturday to 7am Monday. Both permits are free. This sets out who needs which, and how the routing rule works.

What actually stops a lorry delivering in London?

Four separate regimes, and only two of them are charges. A vehicle can be fully paid up on every toll in the capital and still be unable to make the delivery, because the other two are a permit and a curfew.

Our road charges article covers the third row, with the rates. This one covers the first two, which are the ones that stop the job rather than price it.

What is the London Lorry Control Scheme?

A noise control, not a traffic control. London Councils runs it, and it restricts which roads heavy goods vehicles over 18 tonnes maximum gross weight may use at night and at weekends, to keep lorries out of residential streets while people are asleep.

The threshold is the vehicle's maximum gross weight rather than what it is carrying, so an empty 18-tonne vehicle is inside the scheme and a fully loaded 7.5-tonner is outside it. That is the opposite of how most drivers assume a weight limit works.

It is also not a London-wide ban. The scheme divides the capital's roads into two sets, and a vehicle over the threshold may use one set freely at any hour. The restriction bites only on the other set, and only during controlled hours.

When do the restrictions apply?

Overnight on weekdays and almost all weekend. These are the controlled hours as London Councils publishes them.

Read the weekend row twice. From Saturday lunchtime until Monday morning is a continuous controlled period of roughly 42 hours, which is why a weekend delivery into a London residential area is a different kind of booking from the same delivery on a Tuesday afternoon.

The bank holiday line is the one that catches planners. A quiet city on a bank holiday Monday looks like the easiest day of the year to deliver, and the restrictions are running exactly as they would on any other day.

What is the Excluded Route Network, and how must a vehicle use it?

The Excluded Route Network is the set of roads a heavy vehicle may use at any time without permission — London Councils describes it as a core network of routes, usually trunk roads and similar. Everything else is a restricted road during controlled hours.

Permission does not hand you a free run of the restricted network. A vehicle holding permission must travel along the Excluded Route Network to the closest point to its destination, and complete the journey using the shortest distance along restricted roads.

That rule decides routing rather than describing it. A satnav shortest-path route through a residential grid is non-compliant even for a vehicle with permission, because compliance is measured as trunk road to the nearest point, then the shortest hop — and a route planned the other way round is a penalty waiting to be issued.

Does a permission cost anything, and how long does it last?

Nothing, and five years. London Councils states that the permissions are free and that an individual vehicle permission lasts for a period of five years.

Permission is granted on need rather than on request. If the whole journey can be made on the Excluded Route Network, or the vehicle is under 18 tonnes, no permission is required and none will be issued — so an application that cannot show why restricted roads are necessary does not produce a permit.

Enforcement is on the ground. The scheme is enforced at the roadside by a team of enforcement officers whose observations go to a back office team, which decides whether to begin the statutory process. Operator and driver are penalised separately, and the operator's penalty is the larger of the two, so the cost of a non-compliant route does not stop at the cab.

What is the Direct Vision Standard?

A rating of how much a driver can see directly out of the cab, and a permit that depends on it. Transport for London requires all lorries over 12 tonnes gross vehicle weight entering or operating in Greater London to hold a valid HGV Safety Permit.

The rating runs from zero, described as limited, to five, described as good, and it reflects how the vehicle left the production line rather than what has been bolted to it since. A low cab with a deep windscreen rates well; a high-sided construction tractor unit frequently does not.

Two things make this a different animal from the Lorry Control Scheme. The threshold is 12 tonnes rather than 18, which pulls in a whole class of vehicle the night ban never touches. And the scheme operates 24 hours a day, every day of the year, so there is no quiet hour in which it does not apply.

What does a low-rated lorry have to do?

Fit the Progressive Safe System. TfL states that a zero, one or two star rated vehicle must have the Progressive Safe System fitted to receive a new permit, and that the previous Safe System conditions lapsed on 27 October 2024.

1. Check the star rating for the vehicle, which comes from the manufacturer's design rather than from an inspection.
2. If it rates three or more, apply for the permit on the rating alone.
3. If it rates zero, one or two, fit the Progressive Safe System first, then apply.
4. Apply before the vehicle enters London, not before it loads — the permit is free, so there is no reason to leave it to the day.

Fitting the system does not raise the star rating; it satisfies the permit condition instead. That distinction matters when a fleet is planned, because a vehicle that needed equipment to qualify still needs it on the next permit.

How do the two schemes interact?

They overlap without aligning, which is the practical problem. Different weights, different geography, different clocks.

A 14-tonne rigid therefore needs a Safety Permit and is outside the night restriction entirely. An 18-tonne vehicle needs both. And a vehicle compliant on both can still be stopped by a signed weight limit on the last street, which is a borough matter rather than either scheme.

The sequence also matters. A Safety Permit is a fleet decision made once per vehicle and good until it expires; a Lorry Control permission is a decision about which roads that vehicle may use, applied for separately and justified by need. Getting the first does nothing for the second, and a carrier that quotes a heavy-vehicle job into London without confirming both has quoted a job it may not be able to run.

What should you tell a carrier about a London delivery?

Three facts, and the postcode is not the useful one. What decides whether a job is straightforward is the vehicle class, the hour and the last hundred metres.

1. The delivery window, in particular whether it falls inside controlled hours or at a weekend.
2. The access at the address — width, signed weight limits, and whether a smaller vehicle could complete the job.
3. What is being moved, because the answer decides the vehicle, and the vehicle decides which of the two schemes applies.

Where the answer is that the load does not need a heavy vehicle at all, both schemes fall away. That is the cheapest compliance there is, and it is why our payload and gross vehicle weight article is the first thing to read before booking anything into London.

What is our part in this?

Most of our London work is van and small-vehicle work, which sits under both thresholds and needs neither permit. Where a job genuinely needs a heavy vehicle, it is carried out by partner carriers operating under their own operator's licence, and the permit and the routing are theirs to hold.

What we do is ask about the window and the access before quoting, because the difference between a Tuesday afternoon and a Sunday morning into a residential street is not a surcharge, it is a different vehicle. Our kerbside and unloading article covers the access half, drivers' hours the part of the window we cannot move, and same-day courier the service itself.

For loads past what any van can take, see when your load is too big for a van and the Luton van; for the daily charges, road charges on a delivery.