A spokesman for the commercial insurance team at Aviva added: “It is quite proper and accepted practice for an employer to ask an employee both about driving licence eligibility and collision history.

“Such information is pertinent to the risk and, of course, driving convictions will not differentiate between in-work/outside-of-work scenarios. If a particular issue is revealed, there will be occasions when a responsible employer will actually provide assistance to help keep the driver and others safer in the future.”

The critical message for employees is that safety doesn’t stop mattering at the office entrance, so any help provided to keep an employee safe on business journeys will keep them and their family safe on private trips too.

This should mean employees are willing to consider whatever steps are felt necessary to protect them and make them safe on the road.

Andy Price, practice leader – Europe, motor fleet at Zurich, said: “It is important for organisations to fully understand the underlying root causes of why collisions occur, and to do this it is important that they analyse all collisions, regardless of whether the journey was a work-related one or not.

“Looking at the overall risk management approach, while collision analysis is an important element, there are other initiatives an organisation can put in place with all drivers, regardless of vehicle ownership, which will help develop an overview of each driver’s risk profile.”

From this perspective, the growing role of telematics is a key area to consider, although fitting a system to a private car would need careful support from management.

Price said: “The increasing availability of low-cost and self-install systems has made this technology feasible for use with the grey fleet. Any organisation can consider this as part of their grey fleet policies and procedures.”

However, this may only give them additional insight into work-related journeys as drivers could demand a privacy button for journeys outside the business day, which would still leave companies in the dark about a driver’s true risk management profile.