Hazards On The Road

One of the most dangerous thing that your employees can do is to drive - and that's official. UK Health & Safety Executive (HSE) research estimates that between a quarter and third of all road traffic incidents involve someone - a driver, passenger or member of the public - who is at the work at the time. And, according to the TUC, the 1,000 work-related fatalities, together with 12,000 serious injuries and 70,000 slight injuries, add up to a cost of £3.7bn to society and £2.7bn to employers.

Digging deeper produces some even more alarming statistics. Research by the Transport Research Laboratory suggests that company car drivers have a 30% to 40% greater involvement in road accidents than those driving for domestic purposes. For higher mileage drivers the risks of fatal and major injury are equivalent to those faced by workers in hazardous industries. At 25,000 miles per year the risk of dying is roughly equivalent to such risks in coal mining. According to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), about 10% of occupational drivers - perhaps 300,000 people - cover this sort of mileage. Arguably, drivers who cover more than 100,000 miles annually get close to levels of intolerable risk.

Since the costs to employers - particularly the uninsured costs - are very significant, why haven't they done more to tackle the problem? RoSPA says that, apart from those relatively few organisations committed to achieving excellence in health and safety (H&S), as opposed to simply regulatory compliance, there has been an unspoken assumption that road safety is not part of occupational safety and health. The main reason for this has been the absence of any specific regulations or official guidance on the subject, compounded by the decision by HSE not to enforce the general requirements of H&S law in this area. A further factor has been that deaths or injuries in work-related road traffic accidents have not been reportable under the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR).

If work-related driving accidents have fallen through the health and safety net in the past, this looks set to change. In November last year, following investigation and consultation, the Work-related Road Safety Task Group recommended that existing health and safety law should be applied to on-the-road work activities and that employers should manage road risk in the same way as they manage other occupational H&S risks. It said that, whatever the size of the firm, employers should assess risks and take proportionate action to safeguard their employees from them. HSE has now considered the implications of the group's proposals and reported back to the Health and Safety Commission (HSC), which in turn will report back to the Government, probably later this year. If the task group's proposals are accepted, a standing body should take forward the recommendations and monitor their implementation, with a first report to the Government and HSC in spring 2004.

What will be involved
Bringing work-related road safety under the HSE umbrella will force employers to design new fleet strategies or review existing ones. RoSPA says that the approach needs to be adapted to the circumstances of the organisation and the kind of vehicle use in question. But the underlying principle is that every journey should be planned rather than left to chance. It suggests that it is possible to assess risks by concentrating on the critical features of journeys, vehicles and drivers, to help identify those factors which are likely to increase the probability of accident involvement.