What are the business benefits of acting on 'at work' driver risk?

Producing a driver risk management programme can bring a range of benefits to your fleet operations, says AA DriveTech

Around a third of road traffic collisions involve a person at work,” states the Department for Transport’s British Road Safety Statement, published in December 2015. Driving for work involves risk; employers have legal, financial, moral and reputational reasons to act. With a driver risk management programme, employers can benefit from:​

Improved compliance: It ensures your duty of care to employees and minimises your exposure under health and safety and corporate manslaughter legislation.
Enhanced employee safety: It reduces the impact on driver, either physically or psychologically.
Reduced fleet running costs: It minimises damage to vehicles so you avoid hikes in insurance premiums and other additional costs.
Maintaining brand reputation: It helps you avoid bad publicity from driving incidents.

AA DriveTech’s driver risk management programmes can ensure that you’re both minimising risk and driving a better business. That’s the core of what we do.

Starting your journey

Since 1990, AA DriveTech, part of the AA, has been working with many organisations to reduce occupational road risk.

As a result, we have refined a five-step ‘one-stop-shop’ approach to driver risk management called ‘The Journey’. It comprises of five key components: Audit, Validate, Assess, Train and Manage. But it’s not a prescriptive approach. Indeed, we encourage organisations to create tailored programmes to meet their own needs.

Audit

We will take an in-depth look at the organisation’s current policies, procedures and practices from a legal, financial and operational standpoint. This culminates in a detailed survey report highlighting areas of concern.

Validate

Driving licence validation is a crucial early step in effective driver risk management. It ensures that your drivers are legal and have the correct entitlement to drive. With many years’ experience in this area, we now offer eConsent capabilities to our customers that remove paperwork and admin overheads from the licence checking mandate process through online digital authentication. This means we operate a speedy, highly costeffective validation service that can accommodate any size of fleet.

Assess

It is a legal requirement to assess employees’ exposure to risk in the workplace and driving is no exception. The most effective approach is to use an online driver risk assessment tool that can be completed at any time 24/7. The level of risk exposure is then identified together with appropriate training such as in-vehicle, classroom or online e-learning.

Train

Whatever training is delivered, we pride ourselves in having some of the most experienced and highly qualified defensive driving trainers anywhere in the UK.

We can also provide specialist training for foreign drivers, minibus drivers, LGV and PCV drivers as well as 4x4 off-road drivers.

Manage

Driver risk management should be viewed as an on-going, evolving process but the only way to ensure you have control is to ensure that you have relevant, accurate data and information at your fingertips.This can now be achieved, thanks to our FleetRiskManager portal.

This is an online management tool that gives a real-time picture of assessment results, training outcomes, licence status and vehicle service records, together with driver-declared information.

Key Benefits

Many hundreds of organisations have benefitted from this holistic approach and achieved both compliance and real business benefits.

We pride ourselves in delivering driver risk management programmes that make a difference.

Case study: Close Brothers

Close Brothers is a leading merchant banking group, providing lending, deposit taking, wealth management services and security trading. The company employs around 3,000 people, principally in the UK, with nearly 1,000 staff driving for work, of which 60% drive company-leased cars.

The fleet is managed centrally but is run through 20 separate Close Brothers organisations. The board, through its risk committee, takes its duty of care compliance very seriously. In the last five years, the company has implemented, from scratch, a driver risk and compliance programme for every driver who drives on company business, including staff who drive their own cars for work.

Close Brothers chose AA DriveTech, due to its track record and robust online portal, FleetRiskManager (FRM).

Today, every driver (and nominated partner), has their licence validated against the DVLA database, the results managed within FRM and any issues highlighted. Likewise, all at work drivers undertake an online risk assessment with associated e-learning. Drivers who come out with very high risk exposure and/or more than six points on their licence, are automatically offered on-road driver training. In the rare situations, where drivers have more than nine points, a specialist Speed Recognition Course is offered to demonstrate the driver’s commitment to behaviour change before a possible court appearance. In addition, all private car details and documentation can be logged within the FRM portal.

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