World day for safety and health at work

We are supporting this important day by urging businesses to think about their driving for work activities – are they part of your overall health and safety management?

Could you afford to pay £750,000 in fines and costs because you’d failed to ensure the health and safety of your drivers?

That figure was the reality for one company last year, after two of their drivers were tragically killed back in 2013. The company were found guilty of health and safety breaches.

You might be under the illusion that health and safety merely relates to what you do as a company to keep your staff and customers safe on site. You’d be wrong.

If you employ more than five people and your staff drive as part of their job, it’s your job to make sure they’re as safe as they possibly can be.

Essentially that means If you drive as part of your job, your workplace becomes your vehicle, and your vehicle a piece of work equipment, and it doesn’t matter who owns it.

More than a quarter of accidents involve people who are driving as part of their employment – that’s a lot of accidents that could have potentially been prevented, with the right training.

In the absolute extreme, if you fail in your duty of care to protect your employees whilst they’re on the road, you as a business owner, or managing director, could face a corporate manslaughter charge, under health and safety legislation.

You could also face fines equating to 20% of your turnover. It doesn’t matter if your company is large or small – a fifth of your turnover is a lot. More sobering though is this thought – if one of your employees was driving for work and they were killed on the road, how would you feel if under investigation, your company hadn’t given that driver the right training to help keep them safe. Would you want that on your conscience?

If this sounds scary and you weren’t aware of your responsibilities as an employer, the Health & Safety Executive (HSE) has published a document called ‘Driving at Work – managing work-related road safety,’ which will help. Check out the link for more information: Click Here

We’ve also developed a 60 second survey to help you determine whether you’re doing enough to manage driver safety. The simple survey only has six questions – you know you’re doing everything right if you answer yes to every single question. Conversely if you answer no to any one of them, you could be leaving your drivers and your company vulnerable. To take our survey Click Here