This year’s Road Safety Week, by Brake, focuses on Safe Roads For All. As a part of that, we have decided to delve into driving at work – seeing as it is the cause of almost a third of road deaths in the UK*.
Incidents due to Driving for work is a leading cause for negatively affecting business in the UK. This means that if your company uses vehicles for work, you are more likely to have a lost time injury, or face prosecution for incidents on the road.
National Highways and Roadsafe commissioned a study, using data from 2018*, which showed that 29% of road deaths were the outcome of a ‘driving-for-work’ collision. The vast majority of those killed via the aforementioned statistic were not, in fact, workers; they were members of the public / non-working road users (83%).
Although the legal obligation is with drivers to comply with road traffic acts, and the highway code, Employers are required to have carried out risk assessments of any risks encountered in their business. This includes risk assessments that involve driving/travelling by road.
Furthermore, it is the employer’s liability for the actions of their employee during the course of their work. Therefore, if, like in the case of Michael Eyres v Atkinsons Kitchens and Bedrooms Ltd (2007), an employer does not suitably guard the employee from risk of injury, partial blame lies with the employer – meaning that damages could be fined to your business in this eventuality!
P.61 of the document states: “He [Mr. Eyres] must bear some further personal responsibility for his accident. On the other hand, he [Eyres] was in that predicament because his employers had put him there. His employer was next to him fast asleep. His employer was doing nothing to guard against the very risk of injury from which he ought to have been saving his employee.”
Control Measures you can put in place
To help avoid circumstances like the above, there are control measures that you, as a business, can put in place.
Put clear rules in place for drivers’ working hours
Explicit standards of behaviour for staff and responsibility of management
Timetable rest breaks; little and often is key
Ensure robust Risk Assessments are in place and used by staff to cover your duty of care
Keep your workforce trained and up-to-date
How we can help
Base Solutions can help your business to educate and train your workforce. For example, we can help you introduce robust risk assessments; either through one of our courses (such as the Introduction to Risk Assessments), or via one of our template documents.
For more information, get in touch.
Sources: Brake, *National Highways Study