The toll on the roads
A thousand people are killed every year as a result of driving while at work. Twelve thousand working drivers sustain serious injuries and 70,000 suffer lesser injuries. That's not including passengers and it doesn't include other road users they hit. It doesn't include the accidents that happen when people are driving to and from work, either. What's even worse is that these drivers are probably not over the drink-drive limit. What's killing and injuring them is being over other limits - the speed limit and the tiredness limit. Being awake for 17 hours causes the same lack of control over a vehicle as being over the drink-drive limit, so fatigue is a major problem.
Aside from the pain and suffering caused to them and their families, this tragic toll is a massive £3.7 billion annual cost to society and a sky-high £2 billion to employers. It all adds up to a good reason for taking action over occupational road risk. And while we can't ignore personal responsibility, the new element that road safety campaigners are trying to address is the role of employers. The independent Work-Related Safety Task Group that reported last year (the Dykes Report) called for a number of measures that could improve road safety markedly. They included more guidance for employers, better training for drivers, more detailed reporting by the police and so on. The report drew on examples of existing good practice, the campaigning work of groups such as RoSPA, and the views of trade unions. In particular, the Dykes Report called for driving at work to be treated just like any other aspect of health and safety at work.

Managing occupational road risk
A health and safety approach to managing occupational road risk means an emphasis on assessing the risks, developing an action plan, and monitoring its effectiveness. Workers' representatives (called safety reps) should be consulted to make sure that the risk management process isn't carried out in a vacuum, free from the experience of the actual drivers!
Action plans can include taking steps to reduce drivers' working hours and better planning of routes to avoid unnecessary journeys. The health and safety principle of emphasising substitution may mean shifting some journeys on to public transport, which, despite high profile disasters, remains safer than road travel. The question to ask is: "is the journey really necessary, and does it need to be done by road?"

Speed kills

Another aspect is speed, and getting it down (this year's BRAKE Road Safety Week was all about how speed kills). Certainly there is no excuse for driving faster than the speed limit - but that doesn't mean there is no explanation. For people driving for their work, the explanation for their speed can sometimes be the way their work is organised. Providing people with schedules that require them to break the speed limit is actually an offence already under road traffic legislation, but this is not common knowledge, let alone a common charge. More insidious, anyway, is the way that people who have to drive just get given large workloads. They aren't actually told to break the speed limit and they could get around the places they need to visit without breaking the road speed limit if they worked absurdly long hours. Or their schedule might not take account of traffic jams and road works, which can throw schedules out. So tackling speed on the roads needs a twin approach - better driver awareness and training (employer action to improve the awareness of their commercial drivers could also have an effect on non-work driving patterns, too) and better scheduling by employers, taking account of the time that deliveries take, as well as traffic delays and so on.

Being awake for 17 hours causes the same lack of control over a vehicle as being over the drink-drive limit

Why did it happen?
Finally, employers can even turn accidents into preventive tools, through proper investigations. Because the deaths of employees killed while working on the roads are investigated by the police as individual incidents, the root causes behind the accidents - driver fatigue, poor state of company vehicles - may never come to light. The TUC wants employers to take responsibility for their driving workforce, including investigating road traffic accidents as they would any accident in the workplace, so that theycan learn the lessons. Hopefully, investigating smaller incidents (including those where the only damage is to the vehicle) could help prevent more serious accidents.

Employers can even turn accidents into preventative tools through proper investigations

Managers should take as much responsibility for the safety of workers they send on to the roads as they do for people they send on to the factory floor. Some employers are doing this already, and seeing the benefits. Recent research in Scotland suggests that more and more employers have policies to govern the driving their workers do. The TUC wants employers to take more responsibility for the safety of their employees who drive for work. If all employers with drivers on the roads took their responsibilities more seriously, our roads would become safer places for road users and pedestrians alike. If the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) investigated the safety management practices of all employers whose staff drive while at work, that would encourage managers to become as responsible for the safety of their drivers as they should be for their non-mobile staff. The Dykes Report called for the HSE to play a greater role in inspecting the risk management policies of employers whose staff drive for their work and providing guidance on managing occupational road risks. Those employers who don't adopt good practice because of their own understanding of the issue may need a visit from an HSE Inspector to get them to manage road risks properly.

Simple measures
The steps that need to be taken are simple and would cost little money to employers (although HSE would need more money to pay for their inspections). Indeed, these measures would save business money, as well as saving lives.
Managing occupational road risk could make a major contribution to reducing the toll of death, injury and misery on the roads.

By Owen Tudor, TUC Senior Policy Officer