Reducing Risk Within Your Fleet. Part 2: Effective Management
Posted on 29th March 2021 at 12:02
Following on from Part One, The Risk and The Law, the next part in our series of 'Reducing Risk Within Your Fleet', is all about effective management.
Risk Assessment:
Risk management is about taking practical steps to protect people from injury or harm. This is the key activity to health and safety management. If done correctly risk assessments help to identify significant risks and assist in identifying sensible controls to reduce and manage those risks.
All business related activity should be risk assessed and routine reviews will confirm they remain valid.
Three key risk factors associated with all types of work-related driving have been identified as fatigue, time pressure and distraction.
Control:
If managed effectively, work related road risk can be reduced significantly, making the roads safer for your employees and other road users as well as reducing insurance premiums, managing your business reputation, maintaining/improving workplace morale and reducing the potential for motor vehicle incidents.
Business use:
Click on this texAny vehicle provided by your organisation, including daily rental vehicles, must be insured for business use. Anyone using their own private car for business use, must have business insurance cover.
Good Safety Record:
This can only be maintained with a proactive safety management system as opposed to reacting to events as they occur. Prevention is always better than the cure and this will identify weaknesses in the systems and processes, which in-turn raise awareness of potential accidents in the future.
Plan, Do, Check Act, HSG65, HSE,2013
This revised edition of one of HSE’s most popular guides is designed for leaders, owners and line managers. It will particularly help those who need to put in place or oversee their organisation’s health and safety arrangements.
Specific actions depend on the type of industry, however the following guidance can be applied to most circumstances and situations.
Attitude to road safety:
Company culture, ongoing training and positive attitudes help to reduce risk for road incidents and accidents. This can be reflected in the company’s overall Health and Safety policy. In addition, recording and celebrating good performance in work-related road safety becomes a conscious point of discussion and will be taken more seriously across the workforce.
Overall, the potential danger of vehicle operations must be taken seriously, as a potential cause of death or personal injury and not just risk of damage and cost.
Control Measures:
An appropriate strategy will consist of a variety of interventions, rather than a single fix for all approach. These include:
Justification of risk-creating activity - the benefits of doing something should always outweigh the risks, otherwise, even if the risks are small it should be abandoned.
Setting appropriate risk limits - to indicate the maximum level of risk that can be tolerated before an activity has to be abandoned.
Risk/cost optimisation below these limits - ongoing effort to reduce risks is vital, until a clear point of diminishing safety returns is reached.
Part three of this series looks at The Driver.
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