Driver Risk Management for Safety Professionals
Management of staff who drive for work falls under current health and safety at work legislation.
The Management of Health & Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require you to risk assess all business activities – this includes activities that involve driving, such as using commercial vehicles for making collections and deliveries or sending service engineers to visit clients. It also covers those with company cars, and those who might use their own cars, for business journeys such as visiting clients and suppliers, or attending training sessions or exhibitions.
Basically, if the journey would not have been made had the driver not been working for you, then it counts as a business journey and is covered by health and safety at work legislation.
The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974, then provides further guidance, the four most important provisions being:
Section 2: Your business activities must not endanger employees, in this case your drivers.
Section 3: Your business activities must not endanger others, in this case other road users and pedestrians
Section 7: Everyone in the company must follow established safe working policies and procedures, such as those covering vehicle safety, driver fatigue or mobile phone use.
Section 37: Directors and senior managers must put in place appropriate safe working policies and procedures to minimise the chances of incidents occurring.
Improving driver management
We’ve created a good practice driving for work policy template, and resources to share with drivers and colleagues, that will help you ensure legal compliance, implement good practice, and also start to realise some significant business benefits around improved performance, efficiency and cost control.
Free Resources
Want to get started quickly? Here’s two resources to help you on your way.
Fleet Confidence Course
This short, free, online course, developed by FleetCheck with help from DfBB, is designed to help you understand your legal duty of care, know your 10 most important driver safety tasks and help you create a legally compliant ‘Driving for Work’ policy.
FleetCheck provides the UK’s most recommended vehicle and driver management software and is the only such software solution recommended for the FORS and Van Excellence accreditations.
Van Driver Toolkit
Working with the National Highways Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention Team, we have produced a series of over 36 driver information online modules to assist van drivers and fleet operators in dispelling uncertainty and myth.
One of your most important tasks is effective driver communication. Send these out once a month and you have a pre-written three-year programme of driver safety updates in a variety of formats.
