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Many companies fall foul of the Health and Safety Executive, and daily, court rulings are being reported about organisations that have fallen short in the duty of care they should be extending to their employees and any third party their actions could affect, yet still there is a failure by organisations to protect themselves adequately.
Fleetrisk24 often speak with companies that have either no policies for their workplace transport safety and work related road safety, or the ones they do have are woefully out of date and do not meet their needs or address their risks. These are not start up or small companies, but also larger well established ones that you would expect to have all this sown up.
The problem is seemingly when the word ‘transport’ comes up, and many health and safety managers admit they don’t fully understand this area of health and safety and see it as something more specialist. Fleetrisk24 have suggested the reason for this is partly because it involves a moving activity, and drivers, and work related road safety, being an off-site activity, is one that has an out of sight out of mind mentality. It is also not black and white and more difficult to ‘fence off’ to prevent others being hurt. The question of responsibility often crops up and it is perceived that the responsibility of the employer depends on ownership of the vehicle being driven. This in fact does not matter, and if a vehicle is being used by an employee for a business journey, regardless of ownership, the employer has a duty of care to ensure the health and safety of the employee and to ensure both employee and vehicle are legally compliant.
The recent abolishment of the counterpart driving licence is already being seen as adding to the problem of driver monitoring for some and driver entitlement may be in danger of not being checked correctly. If this is the case the organisation will be at serious risk of breaching their duty to ensure the driver is legally compliant.
As with road safety and drivers in general, there are probably a high percentage of organisations who ‘don’t think it will happen to them’ and who choose not to address their health and safety problems. There are also those who are unaware any of it applies to them and may consider themselves too small to worry about it. However, there is no defence for ‘not knowing the rules’.
Fleetrisk24 have recently introduced a FREE ‘Fleet Safety Health Check’ service to identify what you already have in place, highlight risk areas and management issues and suggest ways to help you resolve your risks.
Fleetrisk24 specialise in Transport Health and Safety helping organisations manage ALL aspects of their Transport Health and Safety to include:
- ensuring your policy and arrangements documents meet your needs and are up to date
- reviewing/updating existing documents, or creating a new set if you don't have any in place
- an online fleet risk management (frm) system to manage your drivers and vehicles
- driving licence validation services confirming driver status
- vehicle compliance checks on private vehicles used by employees for business journeys
- online driver evaluation to check driver knowledge and attitude
- specialist in vehicle driver development to improve driver skills and economy
Following your health check Fleetrisk24's specialist consultants can tailor services to meet your company's individual needs aiming to put the corporate in a robust, defendable position should an incident occur. For further details visit the Fleetrisk24 website. |
Many issues that feature in our news section may be of concern to you as an employer if you employ company drivers. It is important that you, as a company, are fully compliant with your responsibilities to those employees.
Fleetrisk24 Ltd specialises in Work Related Road Safety and Workplace Transport Safety and can help you put policies and processes in place to address your transport health and safety requirements. For information about how we can help, in conjunction with you, manage your at work drivers, either:
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