Frequently Asked Questions
What is meant by the term 'work related road safety?
ANSWER
There is no explicit definition of 'work related road safety' in 'Driving at Work', the HSE/DfT guidance (INDG 382) which was launched in September 2003. The term relates to the management of the risks which employees and the self-employed face (and which they create for others) when they are on a public highway in the course of their work. In the UK context this excludes commuting, except where employees' at-work journeys start from their home to go to a work location which is not their normal place of work. WRRS encompasses risks faced by people whose job is driving (LGV, PSV drivers etc) as well as the vast majority of the workforce who have to use or travel in a road vehicle at some point to do their job, including using their own vehicles. It encompasses at-work pedestrians, not just those engaged in activities like road works and vehicle recovery but the vast range of people whose jobs bring them into proximity with moving traffic. WRRS also links to vehicle safety on worksites where accidents in the UK currently account for 15-20 per cent of fatal and major notifiable injuries. With the exception of accidents at road works, during vehicle recovery, deliveries etc, the vast majority of 'at work' road accidents are still not reportable as 'at work' accidents in the UK.
Please could you advise on the following scenario?
In addition to having company vehicles (Cars and Commercial Vehicles), some managers take an allowance instead and purchase their own car to use. Also staff get an allowance for using their own cars (have to get their cars covered on their policy for 'business use' ). We obviously have a duty to ensure our company-owned vehicles are road-worthy etc, but how do we stand legally\health & safety wise in respect of the managers and staff using their vehicles (as stated above)? i.e., is ensuring vehicles are Taxed. MOT'd & serviced the owner's responsibility? If so, should we insist on them servicing their vehicle annually etc and providing copies of documentation to us? I look forward to receiving your advice on this matter.
ANSWER
Employers owe the same duty of care under H&S law to employees driving their own vehicles as they do to company owned or lease hired vehicles. The law requires them to assess risks and take reasonably practicable precautions. Obviously they need to ensure that vehicles used on company business are fit for purpose (e.g. avoiding delivery of unsecured goods equipment etc in cars) and are in a safe condition.
They may also wish to ensure that vehicles are fitted with desirable additional safety features. The test of compliance with these duties is one of 'reasonableness'. If company and lease vehicles are procured and serviced centrally, it is easier for the employer to specify their safety requirements and keep a check on matters such as servicing. On the other hand, if employees use their own vehicles, the employer should certainly remind them that they must comply with RT law, have business cover and a valid MoT and that the vehicle should be serviced in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions.
They also need to remind all drivers and their line managers about the need for daily and periodic vehicle condition checks. Managers do not however need however to tie themselves up in meaningless administration and record keeping, especially where the effort involved is disproportionate to any resulting safety gain. They might for example choose simply to do some spot checks from time to time asking to see service records etc and also examine these things if and when they carry out investigations of any accidents/incidents.
We are developing an occupational road risk strategy for our company drivers. Guidance says a risk assessment should be carried out but should this extend to every vehicle trip? Is it reasonable to ask every driver to fill in a risk assessment pro-forma before each business journey?
ANSWER
There is advice in the new HSE/DfT guidance (INDG 382) on how to carry out risk assessment but this could be read as meaning, as you suggest, that a written assessment should be carried out for every journey. In principle some form of assessment should always be carried out, but a written record is not necessary for every journey.
In general employers should carry out an adequate and suitable generic assessment of risks for the various kinds of driving task that are undertaken in their organisation (e.g. delivering goods, travelling to meetings, call-outs, emergency response, vehicle recovery operations, courier delivery etc), looking at safety critical features of: journey task; vehicle; and driver/rider - that are likely to increase the chance of crashes happening.
This kind of evaluation can then be used be used to prioritise areas for possible intervention and control options (e.g. from avoidance of travel through video conferencing for example, and using safer modes through to safer journey design, fit for purpose, properly maintained vehicles, to driver training). If the journey is a regular and predictable one, the line manager and driver(s) can build on the generic assessment and work together, for example, to examine routing and timing issues in more detail and fine tune risk controls, linking these to site transport risk assessment, where vehicles are going onto other organisations' premises.
If, as is often the case however, decisions about these things are in the hands of the driver, he/she needs to be empowered to do dynamic assessment, for example, by using a simple pre-journey. The aim should be to avoid meaningless bureaucracy and form filling and develop approaches which actually help managers and drivers to make sound decisions about controlling risk.
If approximately one third of road deaths are work related, how many accidents are related to people going to and from their place of employment? The infrastructure around places of work must be a key factor as well!
ANSWER
We don't have a reasonable figure but one can be derived from the proportion of vehicle miles of relevant classes of vehicle driven for various purposes as assessed in the National Travel Survey, combined with the KSI rate per vehicle mile for each class of vehicle. Principal uses of cars, for example, are known to include commuting, maintenance journeys (e.g. shopping), at-work driving and leisure driving (holidays, visiting friends, family members etc). A precise estimate of commuting casualties is not available but an intelligent guess might put this at about between a quarter and a third of KSI casualties being associated with commuting accidents.
Although employers' duties of care do impact commuting safety, to the extent that they should not impair an employee's capacity to drive home safely (e.g. by causing undue fatigue, imposing distractions etc), employers can influence commuting risks in various ways: reducing exposure through allowing home working; facilitating use of public transport; organising transport and car sharing; and, of course, providing driver training to improve drivers'/riders' capacity to cope. This links closely with mainstream MORR from a 'business case' angle since the impact on operations etc of an employee road casualty is not really affected by the precise context in which it occurs (it's the same loss).
One major motor manufacturer, for example, was so concerned about the casualty rate among young employees riding motor cycles to work (and in their leisure time) that they set up a motor cycle club on site and engaged ex-police riders to act as instructors and to raise awareness. In its broader sense this sort of approach is characteristic of companies that focus on '24/7 safety', not just for their employees but for relatives and dependants too (an injury to an employee's child, for example is likely to lead to that person being absent from work etc in exactly the same way as if the injury had occurred to them personally).
Do employers’ responsibilities for avoidance of fatigue relate only to vocational drivers working long hours? Would this not also apply to employees who are required to work long hours, not driving, and then drive home feeling fatigued from work? A worker might operate or drive a different machine for up to 11-12 hour days with very early or late starts and finishes. This leaves them driving home feeling exhausted but there may be nowhere on their motorway drive home to stop and rest. Should it be made an employers responsibility, even in these cases, to provide rest facilities for employees who have worked long shifts at the employers behest?
Also, what would be seen as a maximum working day beyond which one would be considered too tired to safely drive perhaps 1-2 hours home?
HSE/DfT guidance ‘Driving at work’ (INDG 382) makes it clear that employers must take fatigue into account when considering the fitness of workers to drive while at work. It is hard to prescribe a safe maximum but obviously requirements stemming from the Working Time Directive may be relevant. The basic rule is that if the employee feels dangerously fatigued or sleepy they should not drive.
RoSPA also produces a lot of guidance on avoidance of fatigue as a key issue in the Management of Occupational Road Risk. In addition to 'Managing Occupational Road Risk the RoSPA guide' (hard copy) we have produced Ebased guidance on safer journey planning which highlights the need for employers to avoid causing people to drive while tired (http://www.rospa.com/roadsafety/info/safer_journey.pdf ).
Employers need to be made aware of the recent 'Produce Connection' case in which a potato firm was fined £30,000 after one of its workers crashed and died while driving home after a third consecutive shift of nearly 20 hours. The Produce Connection, of Chittering, Cambridgeshire, admitted failing to ensure the health of workers and the public. Mark Fiebig, 21, of Soham, died when his van drifted into the path of a lorry on the A10 near Ely in 2002. Judge Gareth Hawksworth at Cambridge Crown Court said the firm had failed to monitor the hours employees worked. The court heard that Mr Fiebig was thought to be suffering from "chronic fatigue" and had fallen asleep at the wheel. The company was also ordered to pay £24,000 costs after admitting two breaches of health and safety law. The case is thought to be the first of its kind in the UK because The Produce Connection admitted breaching health and safety legislation even though Mr Fiebig died outside working hours. Prosecutor Pascal Bates said Mr Fiebig had worked 11 days without a day off prior to his fatal crash. During that time he had worked on average 17 hours a day and was getting three to four hours' sleep a night. Mr Bates said other staff were working similarly long hours. He added: 'Workers were paid by the hour. For payroll purposes a daily note was kept of each worker's working hour.' He said the farm manager 'had to be aware, and so did other management.
The guiding principle here has to be that employers should periodically review driver fatigue, both during ‘at work’ driving and during commuting and develop measures to guard against it. They also need to develop contingency arrangements to help employees to cope with sleepiness through contingency measures such as ‘caff napping’ and/or provision/identification of suitable rest facilities.
To what extent is health and safety law being enforced in relation to ‘at work’ driving?
At present there is relatively little enforcement of occupational health and safety law in relation to work related road safety (WRRS). The Health and Safety at Work (HSW) Act has been used on one or two occasions in the past but the main emphasis in the aftermath of RTAs (Road Traffic Accidents) or RT offences remains enforcement of road traffic law. The vast majority of injuries sustained in accidents on the road during work are not currently reportable by employers under RIDDOR (the Reporting of Injuries Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations). (The exceptions are injuries received during delivery operations, vehicle recovery and loading and unloading.) During current consultation on revision of RIDDOR, many organisations have suggested that all at work road injuries should now be brought within scope and this has been supported by the House of Commons Work and Pensions Select Committee and by the Motorist’s Forum in a recent report of the on WRRS.
The HSE/DfT guidance, 'Driving at Work' (INDG 382 - www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg382.pdf) contains a notice from HSE that, while the HSW clearly applies to on 'at work' safety on the road, WRRS is currently not one of the HSE’s enforcement priorities. The police have begun to ask questions at the scene of road crashes about whether drivers are at work in order to fill in the relevant part of form STATS 19 which asks aboutjourney purpose. (Practice here however may still be patchy.) On 26th January 2006 in a Lords debate on H&S, in response to a request by RoSPA’s President, Baroness Gibson, Lord Philip Hunt OBE (who is responsible for HSC/E), said that HSE and ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers) were committed to finalising their liaison arrangements in the context of enforcement guidelines such as ACPO's 'Road Death Investigation Manual'. The minister also said that HSE (and Local Authority) inspectors would begin to ask questions about management arrangements for WRRS during their visits to employers. HSE, of course, are continuing, where necessary, to take enforcement action about site transport offences and details here can be gleaned from their workplace transport campaign website (www.hse.gov.uk/workplacetransport/sitesafe/index.htm) and their enforcement data base (www.hse.gov.uk/enforce/index.htm ).
Although it might appear that health and safety law will have little impact on WRRS, current developments suggest that the enforcement scene in this area is about to change. HSE and LA inspectors' visits could conceivably lead to the issuing of more prohibition or improvement notices, although in the first instance their approach to compliance will always be through the giving of advice. It is also worth remembering that many more employees are now claiming under ELCI (Employers’ Compulsory Liability Insurance) for injuries sustained in 'at work' road crashes, although there is no central database of claims with which to track trends here. (The Transport Specialist Group of APIL - the Association of Personal Injury Lawyers - and individual insurers may be able to help here possibly.) Looking further ahead, the Government have made proposals to introduce a bill to create a new offence of corporate manslaughter (CM) and these have recently been examined by the House of Commons Home Affairs and Work and Pensions Select Committees in a joint report. Although CM deals with offences by the body corporate as opposed to individual senior managers, in the aftermath of work related road crashes it will, among other things, have the effect of sharpening the focus on director's duties, particularly where safety critical features of journey tasks, vehicles and drivers have been found to be significantly unsatisfactory.
Since information on journey purpose has not been routinely collected by the police when investigating at the scene of serious road crashes, how confident can RoSPA be about the number of road casualties that are 'work related'?
ANSWER
The introduction to the HSE/DfT guidance 'Driving at Work' suggests that up to a quarter of the 3,400 fatal casualties occurring annually on Britain's roads may be work related. This represents up to 20 people killed very week with some 250 suffering serious injury (compared with less than 7 fatal injuries per week in RIDDOR notifiable events (excluding suicides).
The Dykes Group recommended that, in future, data on journey purpose should be collected by the police on form 'Stats 19.' In the meantime reliance still has to be placed on the work done by Business Strategy Group for the Dykes Group (looking at estimates of fatal injury in at-work road crashes from a number of directions - extrapolations from National Travel Survey findings, Police Forces and insurance data).
The estimate of between a quarter and a third of fatalities in road crashes being work related is sufficiently robust to be able to give a broad indication of the scale of the problem. Obviously better data are still needed on prevalence (something the ORSA research group is looking at) but, for the purposes of putting injury levels into perspective, the current estimates can be viewed as sufficiently 'fit for purpose'. Insisting on greater precision about the casualty data before being able to say anything meaningful about prevention could be said to be a case of the 'best being the enemy of the good'!
I am the Health and Safety Officer for a local College. I am currently in the process of writing a policy for the use of personal vehicles for business use. Would you have any advice on this? One of the main concerns or areas of dispute amongst myself and colleagues is the area of endorsements. If a driver shows us their documentation-licence etc. and we know they have endorsements, where do we stand as the employer if they were to have an accident whilst travelling officially on business? Also would they be able to take other people in their vehicle? I have seen a few policies of other companies/ establishments where there is a limit to how many points they will accept -mainly 3. Would be safer to exercise a limit on endorsements? I would be very grateful if you could advise me further.
ANSWER
It sounds as if you need to go on an MORR course for managers and visit websites such as www.orsa.org.uk and www.morr.org.uk. Also have you read HSE's INDG 382 'Driving at Work' (accessible on www.hse.go.uk)?. You need to track licences as part of risk assessment and monitoring. Drivers with points usually need further assessment and training. It is up to you to decide whether to allow employees to be driven by problem drivers. If you are that worried, what about the risk to other road users? If you act reasonably on what you know you will have a defence in the event of an accident.
Please could you let me know where I stand on this situation at work? I have a company car through my company. The cars are leased through a company called XXXXXX and are changed every 12,500 miles, roughly every three months. Whilst working I noticed that I have a nail in my tyre and the company are refusing to pay for this as they feel that the upkeep of the car is my responsibility. There is nothing as far as I know in my contract stating that I am responsible for repairs on the car that weren’t my own fault. Are they breeching health and safety at work law by refusing to pay? My job entails driving roughly 200 miles per day.
ANSWER
Cars are provided for work purposes under many different arrangements. The employer's duty of care is the same in general terms however the car is supplied, be it a lease car, a company owned vehicle, an occasional hire car, a pool car, a cash option, a 'user chooser' car, or the driver's own vehicle. The law states that vehicles must be in a roadworthy condition.
The employer's duty of care means that, as part of their policy, organisation and arrangements for managing work related road safety, they must ensure that vehicles are in a fit condition, for example, by arranging for (or ensuring that drivers pay for) regular servicing and ensuring that drivers carry out daily and weekly checks on safety significant points such as lights, tyres, glass, fluids etc. (Where drivers use vehicles under allowance schemes, this usually includes the cost of servicing and repairs.) If servicing or inspection reveal deficits, understandably the question arises as to who should pay for them to be put right.
Under many lease hire arrangements the company supplying the vehicles will have service arrangements with named garages to have the work carried out as part of the contract. On the other hand, many employers also require employees to pay some element of the excess in insurance claims, for example. Often this is done to incentivise the driver to take care of the vehicle, although linking this sort of requirement to 'fault' is often difficult and can lead to arguments about who is responsible. It can also affect patterns of reporting of accidents and incidents, a vital source of information which is important to the employer to enable them to monitor trends in fleet safety performance.
Health and safety law in general terms prohibits an employer from levying charges on an employee for anything done or supplied to enable them to meet their statutory obligations. For example, you cannot charge a worker for the cost of their protective clothing or equipment or their health and safety training. However, where the employee uses safety related work equipment for domestic as well as work purposes, then the employer may be within their rights to levy a charge for part of the cost and such arrangements, where they arise, are usually agreed through negotiation.
In the case of pool cars used only for work, then it would be reasonable to say that employers would not be able to make charges for maintenance and repair. The difficulty arises if the vehicle is also used for commuting or for domestic and leisure motoring. Keeping a careful record of when and where damage occurred might be one way of establishing who was responsible for meeting the cost of repairs. It is most unlikely that the health and safety enforcing authorities would want to get involved in this sort of issue. A better course of action would be to establish what is good practice in the fleet industry and to present this as part of an overall business case for managing occupational road risk.
Your recent initiative regarding the driving of company vehicles is to be welcomed for I believe much is taken for granted by employers, particularly in respect of 7.5 tonne vehicles that can be driven on a car licence. I would appreciate your (without prejudice) comments on the following: Having closed its kitchens at the main hospital it became necessary for the local hospital Trust to collect meals from a production unit 5 km away at its other site. This is done in 7.5 tonne refrigerated box van fitted with tail lift, previously driven by one of nine 'pool porters' on a nine week roster basis. It was simply 'a there and back' journey carried out at around 7.30 am each day.
Cover porters' were expected to cover any absences due to holidays, sickness etc.. Since porters have undertaken this duty there have been 5 serious accidents. Three porters sustained broken toes, one from a falling food trolley and the two others with toes crushed by the tail lift. Another drove round the hospital site with tail lift un-stowed, demolishing a six inch square hardwood bollard, causing £6,000 of damage to the lorry. In yet another incident, an attempt was made to drive the vehicle under a reception canopy with insufficient headroom, damaging the vehicle and canopy.
Sufficient evidence one would have thought, that driving a lorry should be regarded as a profession and not something that can be done safely for one week in nine or even wider lapses for 'cover porters'. The 'Trust' has now widened deliveries throughout the Borough and appointed a full time driver (who was formerly a porter) for this duty. However, the Trust's officers still believe that driving a 7.5 tonne lorry is the same as driving a car and think it reasonable for 'cover porters' to cover this duty in the driver's absence! This means that a 'cover porter' may be asked to drive this vehicle for one week every twelve months, and indeed may be asked to drive it at a moment's notice, which is I believe an even more dangerous arrangement than the previous one.
ANSWER
What you describe is clearly an unsatisfactory state of affairs and does not seem to reflect good practice nor indeed legal requirements relating to the management of work related road safety. Certainly the law permits a car licence holder to drive a vehicle up to 7.5 tonnes but, where those licence holders are employees and are required to drive as part of their work, health and safety law also applies. In this context it requires their employer to make an assessment of the employee's competence in the overall context of risk assessing their driving. Such assessment of course is not limited to risk on the road while at work. It also needs to be undertaken to enable the employer to satisfy legal requirements concerning site transport safety (on which the Health and Safety Executive have published useful guidance - see below).
Assessing competence in relation to health and safety requirements is not simply a question of checking qualifications such as past training or licence status. It should also involve checking on underpinning knowledge, key skills, the extent of past driving experience and even on underlying attitude. There is nothing in health and safety law to prevent porters who hold a car licence from being employed to drive box vans up to 7.5 tonnes, provided they are competent. At the very least a competence assessment should involve a licence check (repeated periodically), a check of physical fitness etc, and asking questions about past driving of vehicles of that type and accident and enforcement experience etc.
Competence assessment should also address familiarity with both the type and model of vehicle to be driven. From the incidents you describe, it would seem there could well be a case for additional training. From the site transport safety angle alone it is vital that drivers understand site safety arrangements and are competent in safe manoeuvring, particularly reversing safely in confined spaces. Skills need to be practised to remain 'live' so there may still be an issue for trained drivers if they only drive certain kinds of vehicle occasionally.
These questions should be picked up in the periodic review of risk assessments, as undertaken, for example, by joint employer/employee health and safety committees. They should certainly be picked up if the kind of accidents you described are properly investigated. It sounds very much as if the Trust could benefit from basic advice on Managing Occupational Road Risk, taking on board, for example, the advice in HSE's INDG 382 ( http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg382.pdf ) as well as HSE advice on site transport safety in INDG 199 (http://www.hse.gov.uk/pubns/indg199.pdf ).
