THE proposed Corporate Manslaughter bill will hold individual senior managers accountable for deaths involving company vehicles, but this really isn’t ‘new news’.

ACPO already requires police to identify if a senior person in a company established or condoned the working practices that contributed to a fatal accident. Individuals can already be prosecuted.

It is not difficult to reduce the risk of road accidents. You simply need to collect and analyse data on recent accidents, consider ways to reduce accident risk, get board-level sign-off, implement your road safety plan and then evaluate the effects of the changes you have made.

It is common to refer to ‘fleet managers’ but in truth there are relatively few full-time fleet managers. In most organisations the person ultimately responsible for the fleet is a finance director, HR director, company secretary or some other senior person. I’m willing to guess that most recipients of Fleet News fall into this category and have a broader role within their companies, rather than just being responsible for the fleet.

So when we talk of ‘someone who established or condoned the working practices that contributed to a fatal accident’, could that someone be you?