As an employer, you have a statutory duty of care
under the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 – that is, a burden exists for the
employer to assess all the risks involved in employing drivers who are engaged
in company business.
Where do I start?
It’s difficult for fleets to know where to
start with this. Who do I assess? How do I do it in such a way that gives me
the right answers? What about cost? How
will I know if it is working? What types
of supplier could help? Is it a service that can be outsourced?
Every fleet is at different stages in terms of
progress to a better safety culture amongst drivers so many fleets might think:
who knows how much more needs doing and how will I know when I’ve done
enough? It seems there are so many
things to do and they cut across many departments in our business.
Expert Advice
To
have any hope of ending up where you need to be, a fleet may need expert advice
up front to benchmark progress towards a stated objective. A fleet
safety audit assignment must therefore provide the answers in a format that
is useful and understandable to the fleet and additionally recommend a
cost-effective forward path that is commercially acceptable to the fleet.
Key
factors for a safety audit might include the following:
Drivers
Review the risk factors that affect your drivers,
from recruitment through to day-to-day business activity. This includes the
systems you may have in place for driver selection, assessment and training.
Vehicles
Considerations might be vehicle type, use of
vehicle, whether they are ‘fit for purpose’, maintained and serviced
appropriately.
Operational
Operational activities have a huge influence on the
fleet risk factors within an organisation. You will need to consider the radius
of travel, hours of operation, journey times etc. Your day-to-day business
activity presents risk exposure that cannot always be eliminated however you
can review and adjust your existing controls
Management Controls
Review the safety culture of your organisation, from
the top down and how this extends to the day-to-day risks faced by drivers. Consider
elements of driver-manager communication and supervision, policies and
procedures, driver licence checking, incident reporting and investigation, and
performance management.
Accident History
By analysing your incident or claims history, you
can identify key contributing factors to incident causation, and offer specific
remedial action to reduce these occurrences.
Road Risk Management must be fully inclusive
in that the total risk must be subject to the process. The list above is by no
means exhaustive and a fleet needs to ensure its investment in reducing road
risk is broad enough to achieve the objective but also financially
proportionate to the problem.
How we can help
At RVM Fleet Services we offer a Fleet Safety Audit
which helps you to understand your exposure to risk by
examining your existing management practices and procedures and also offers a
straight forward benchmarking tool. Through the process we identify the good, the
bad and the ugly! We believe openness is
what our clients prefer and we cannot reduce frequency and cost by recommending
a program that clearly won’t achieve it.
Whether you require a full Fleet Safety Audit or
just some advice on your current arrangements, call us now to see how we can
help you understand where your biggest fleet risk are and how we can help
minimise these risks quickly,
easily and most importantly, cost-effectively.
Questions? Then please contact us ...
Contact
us now on 01132248888 or visit our website.
