Driving Safety

There will always be risks associated with driving. Although these cannot be completely controlled; an employer has a responsibility to take all reasonable steps to manage these risks and do everything reasonably practicable to protect people from harm in the same way as they would in the workplace. More than a quarter of all road traffic incidents may involve somebody who is driving as part of their work. Health and safety law applies to work activities on the road in the same way as it does to all work activities, this includes the time when employees are driving or riding at or for work, whether this is in a company or hired vehicle, or in the employee’s own vehicle, and you need to manage the risks to drivers as part of your health and safety arrangements. Managing the Risks You must carry out an assessment of the risks to the health and safety of your employees, while they are at work, and to other people who may be affected by your organisation’s work activities. You can do this by consulting with your employees on issues such as: • risks arising from their work. • proposals to manage and/or control these risks. • the best ways of providing information and training. It makes sense to review your risk assessment on a regular basis. There is no set frequency for carrying out a review, but you need to ensure that the risks to those who drive, and others, are suitably controlled. For this to be effective you need to know about any road incidents, your drivers and vehicle history. Changing circumstances may also prompt a review, eg introducing new routes, new equipment or a change in vehicle specification, road and weather conditions and your expectations of your employee - are they particualrly tierd, stressed or have personal issues that can influence their safe driving? If anything significant changes, check your risk assessment, communicate with staff and and update. In most cases, the police will continue to take the lead on investigating road traffic incidents on public roads. HSE will usually only take enforcement action where the police identify that serious management failures have been a significant contributory factor to the incident. If one of your employees is killed, for example while driving for work, and there is evidence that serious management failures resulted in a ‘gross breach of a relevant duty of care’, your company or organisation could be at risk of being prosecuted under the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007. How to manage work-related road safety Organisations have a legal duty to put in place suitable arrangements to manage health and safety. These include: Assessing the risks from work-related road safety in your organisation. • Making sure there is top-level commitment to work-related road safety in your organisation. • Clearly setting out everyone’s roles and responsibilities for work-related road safety. • Ensuring that those responsible should have enough authority to exert influence and be able to communicate effectively to drivers and others. • Making sure that you have adequate systems to allow you to communicate and manage work-related road safety effectively. • Involving your employees and ensuing that they have adequate training. How to monitor work-related road safety Monitoring performance to ensure your work-related road safety systems are implemented and effective is imperative, this can be achieved through encouraging your employees to report all work-related road incidents or near misses. As well as regularly assessing the risks and encourage employees to openly communicate any changes to their circumstances.

For more information on Driving Safety talk to Safety Services Direct Ltd