Are your drivers safe?

In recent months a national debate has been taking place about work-related road accidents. These accidents include those which the public might perceive as occupational incidents, involving well-regulated vehicles like lorries, buses and coaches. However, they also include anyone who works on the road, including pedestrians such as postal workers, maintenance staff and public utility employees. More importantly, from a fleet operator's point of view, they include company car and van drivers, and even employees who drive their own vehicles on occasional work mileage trips.

Three years ago the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) estimated that up to a third of Britain's road deaths in some way involved people who were working at the time. That estimate of between 800 and 1,000 lives lost has recently been confirmed by the independent Work Related Road Safety Task Group. This organisation was established last year as part of an attempt to reduce deaths and serious injuries on our roads by around 40 per cent by 2010.

It is this taskforce which two months ago initiated a national debate on the issue and will continue to seek comments in the coming weeks. At the forthcoming RoSPA Safety & Health at Work congress, taskforce chairman Richard Dykes will lead a discussion on the group's findings and secretary Les Philpott will highlight the scale of the problem and possible measures to control the risks.

Safety benefits
Cutting work-related road accidents will not only have benefits in terms of safety for the public as a whole, but also for any employee who is out and about on our roads. Saving people from death, injury and pain has to be a laudable aim in itself. In addition, the value of preventing a fatal accident is put at more than £1 million. But from a business point of view, it also has positive benefits. Reducing lost time caused by road accidents, the cost of repairs and bad publicity must be a good thing.

Employers now have to decide if they want to take positive steps forward in this area and this is why they are being asked to make their contribution to the debate. RoSPA believes the management of occupational road risk (MORR) has been neglected for too long and the time is right for organisations to adopt a proactive risk management approach to reducing the risks connected with at-work vehicle use.

Driving for work is clearly a risky business. For example, car and van drivers who cover 25,000 miles a year as part of their job are at virtually the same risk of being killed at work as construction workers, while company car drivers have nearly twice the accident liability of drivers in general. Further evidence comes from the Health and Safety Executive's survey of self-reported work-related injury, which has shown that there are 77,000 injuries to employees every year as a result of at-work road accidents.

The systems approach
RoSPA has been arguing that at-work road safety is not just a question of introducing specific control measures, such as those outlined in its guidance document (see factfile). The primary focus must be on ensuring that organisations have a systematic risk management capability, adapting the systems approach to health and safety management advocated by the HSE and the British Standards Institution in guidance documents such as HSG65 and BS 8800.

In other words, organisations will not be able to achieve a cycle of continuous improvement unless:

• they have established and communicated clear road safety policies and objectives
• they have specified the responsibilities and competencies required to achieve them at every level
• they have a planned approach to risk control informed by risk assessment and targets
• they can monitor their road safety performance and feed back lessons from periodic review

In short, managing risk on the road, like managing any kind of work-related risk, cannot be achieved by one-off interventions. Organisations need to focus, in the first instance, on the policies, people and procedures (or system) which they need to have in place and establish the process for working the problem before trying to find solutions.

As the debate continues, the scale of risk, harm and loss associated with at-work road accidents will need to be clearly set out so that policy makers and enforcers can re-assess where they stand, and employers can be challenged to review their own at-work road safety performance in business terms.

Health and safety management system concepts may not be as immediately accessible to those from a road background as to those with an occupational safety background. RoSPA will be stressing the need for all the key players, including road safety professionals, to get to grips with HSG65 concepts so that there is a clear understanding of the primary importance of having the overall system capability in place to manage risk (including risk on the road), rather than focusing purely on control measures.

There is going to have to be a clear and practical focus on the responsibilities of managers of workers who are required to drive or work on the road as part of their job. There will need to be positive examples of senior management leadership by words and deeds, including senior managers' own driving behaviour.

Avoiding prescription
Given the need to integrate MORR as part of occupational safety and health management, there will be a need to avoid prescription, and overall the tone will need to be goal-setting and assessment based. Blanket, one-size-fits-all, approaches are not likely to be effective. Employers cannot prevent all accidents but they can take reasonable steps to make them less likely and/or to reduce their consequences. Thus, the focus needs to be on assessing where at-work road safety problems are likely to be most frequent or serious and tracking key indicators so that employers and employee representatives can develop and apply cost-effective solutions.

The impression should be avoided, for example, that henceforth every at-work driver should get driver training, regardless of risk exposure or development need. Effective monitoring and data management are fundamental to MORR – no monitoring, no management. But the essence of what is involved will need careful explanation, for example when looking at what is appropriate for small firms.

The task group's hope is that the discussion phase will throw up a lot of practical information. There will be a need to probe views and data on questions such as inappropriate use of speed and the contribution of fatigue to at-work road accidents. There will also need to be a look at the impact of driving on health, e.g. musculo-skeletal disorders, as well as the effect of health on driving, e.g. impairment due to stress.

Also near the top of the agenda will be a debate about how to establish more effective enforcement liaison arrangements between the police, the vehicle inspectorate and health and safety enforcers such as the HSE and local authorities. RoSPA would like to see the HSE extending its current inspection of employers' site transport arrangements to look at their systems and standards for controlling risk out on the road. Where employers fail to create a safe system of driving (excessive hours, incentives to speed, required use of mobile phones on the move etc) they should be investigated and prosecuted.

More fundamentally, there is going to be a need to establish a broad strategy for making MORR happen. A broader vision is needed of partnership between a wide range of key players committed to securing best practice as opposed to mere legal compliance.