Changing your driving culture

  • Assess your company’s exposure – how many drivers, how many cars?
  • Check licences, ideally via the DVLA
  • Examine all insurance claims data
  • Look at the vehicles – what state are they in?
  • Divide drivers into high-, medium- and low-risk
  • Plan intervention or training tailored to those levels
  • Ensure all messages clearly communicated from the top
  • Continue assessing and communicating policies and practice – bad habits will eventually worm their way back in
  • Document and demonstrate to all concerned the correlation between risk assessment and reduction of accidents and cost

Case study: BT

BT has a long-standing policy of assessing drivers using IDS online, modifying the tool according to accident history, mileage covered and age of the individual and assigning activities to those who fall into an at-risk category.

“Some are quite good drivers, so why train them? Some are quite good but need a little education, they are middle risk,” says group safety adviser for BT David Wallington.

“And 8-10% come out as being at risk and needing help and support to understand what the risks are and what additional skills they need to manage those risks effectively.”

BT was approached by someone from Loughborough University, who was looking for a topic for their PhD.

“We were keen to get external validation of the interventions we had been running for quite a few years, to see whether we could demonstrate a statistically significant improvement based on data we had  accumulated.

“Training was key in having an impact on accident rates.

The research showed we were getting significantly better performance as a result and there was a strong correlation between the interventions and risk reduction in claim volumes.”

BT’s programme was so successful that over 10 years, claims across a fleet of more than 34,000 vehicles fell from 59 vehicles per 1,000 to 27 per 1,000 and annual costs were cut by more than £14 million.

BT received the Brake fleet safety analysis and action award 2013 for its programme.