For any employee who drives a motor vehicle as part of their job description, that vehicle can be defined as their place of work and therefore subject to Health and Safety legislation.

As an employer of people who may drive a motor vehicle on a road as part of their job function, and in connection with your company business, you have a duty of care over that workforce, and are therefore duty-bound to provide professional driver training to keep them safe from harm on the road. Even if you don’t actually supply the vehicle they use, the implications are the same. People have to be properly trained, and that is a basic Health and Safety requirement.

Before the introduction of the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, if a corporate organisation was brought to trial for some incident or other, and that organisation was found to be liable, it would be the company that would be punished, as in a company name. However, that has now changed, because under the Act liability is brought to the feet of individuals within corporate organisations. That means heads of department, training managers and other held-to-be responsible employees can be individually held accountable and therefore punished as individuals; and where a death or serious injury occurs, perhaps through neglegence, the penalty can be a term of imprisonment.

Despite the many press releases, and other publicity, very few organisations seem to have adaequate safety policies in place to protect both themselves or their workforce from the penalties under the terms of Heath and Safety legislation. One day someone is going to be made an example of, but does it have to come to that for people to sit up and take notice? It can all go so badly wrong and from an accident that may just be a road collision involving a company vehicle user who has perhaps not received an adequate level of driver training.

At Ride Drive we can help safeguard you and your organisation by providing a comprehensive driver training package that will take care of all your driver training needs. Our dynamic driver risk assessment, which is built into every course option, is designed to provide a useful tool that can be incorporated as part of a company Health and Safety policy.

In addition to driver training we can also develop with you a corporate codes of practice policy, a document that outlines company rules concerning the use of company vehicles and the required level of driver behaviour. This may not appear as a very pleasant step to take, but then we do not live in a very pleasant world, as the threat of litigation is ever present.

It is very easy to think that nothing unpleasant is ever going to happen, but unfortunately it does, and more often than not it happens to those that have not prepared for it. Don’t let it be you who is caught out.