ONE of Britain's biggest food companies has saved more than £100,000 a year and improved fleet driver safety by controlling the use of mobile phones among 'lonely' company car drivers.

The firm, which is asking not to be named, slashed £128,000 a year from its mobile phone bill following a safety audit designed to identify areas where drivers were at risk.

The 60% fall in phone use among company car users, part of a new best practice scheme, was achieved after two years of steady increases in phone bills, from an average of £125 per person per month to £280 over two years, as drivers increasingly used phones at the wheel.

Risk management firm Risk Answers identified two key problems as part of a safety audit. The first was 'lonely' drivers, ringing friends and family while on the move to relieve boredom on long journeys.

Jeremy Hay, sales director of Risk Answers, said: 'Staff were using the phone 10% of the time for personal use.

'Secondly, they were also talking to various office-based colleagues and fellow car-driving employees in a bid to answer customer queries as quickly as possible.

'This was partly due to poor in-office call-handling procedures, but it was also due to inefficient sales territory planning.

'By improving all these factors as part of a major safety audit and demonstrating why a comprehensive mobile phone policy should be adopted by every company, we have helped our client slash its mobile phone bills by thousands of pounds. In addition the company is now promoting best practice.'

The policy is also expected to improve safety for drivers, as research has repeatedly shown that driving while using a mobile phone, hand-held or hands-free, can lead to errors and cause crashes.

Officials at the Department for Transport are consulting on plans for an outright ban on the use of hand-held mobile phones while driving.