RoSPA’s MORR™ Campaign
Driving is the most dangerous work activity that most people do.
Millions of cars, vans, lorries, taxis, buses, motorcycles are used for work. Very few organisations operate without using motor vehicles.
About 20 people are killed and 250 seriously injured every week in crashes involving someone who was driving, riding or otherwise using the road for work purposes. The HSE say that “health and safety law applies to on-the-road work activities as to all work activities and the risks should be effectively managed within a health and safety system”.
RoSPA has long campaigned for organisations to adopt a proactive risk management approach to reducing the risks connected with 'at work' vehicle use, tackling this issue within the framework which they will already have in place for managing health and safety at work.
Driving is the most dangerous work activity that most people do.
Taking action to prevent ‘at work’ vehicle accidents means committing some additional resources but the potential financial savings can be very significant indeed.
The true costs of road accidents to organisations are nearly always significantly higher than the resulting insurance claims. HSE research into workplace accidents generally (The Costs of Accidents - HSG96) suggests that, for every £1 recovered through insurance, between £8 and £36 may be lost via uninsured costs.
While organisations may be able to recover vehicle damage costs through insurance, many other costs may not be recoverable. These include: lost time in wages and salaries; lost orders and output; administrative costs, legal fees; and costs due to other kinds of business interruption.
These costs come straight off the organisation's bottom line, reducing its profits or surplus.
...for every £1 recovered through insurance, between £8 and £36 may be lost via uninsured costs.
While some extra costs may be incurred, (for example, in training managers and drivers, in setting policies and implementing new standards, higher specification vehicles and their maintenance, or in adjusting route specifications and work schedules for safety purposes), these are likely to be offset by benefits such as reduced accident losses, less lost staff time, lower insurance premiums and improvement in business efficiency generally, as well as better staff morale and ‘company image’.
Many of the resources required to put a management system in place to manage work related road risks should already be available to enable the organisation to meet its normal occupational health and safety obligations.
Taking action to prevent ‘at work’ vehicle accidents means committing some additional resources but the potential financial savings can be very significant indeed.
RoSPA believes that all employers, large or small, private or public, should seek to develop a systematic approach to managing occupational road risk that is appropriate to their business, for example by:
- gathering and analysing key safety and risk data on their vehicles, journeys, drivers, crashes, causes and costs;
- setting and communicating clear corporate road safety objectives;
- ensuring everyone understands their role in achieving them;
- introducing targeted safety measures based on suitable risk assessment (backed by standards, targets and timescales);
- monitoring performance and learning from accidents and incidents;
- carrying out periodic performance reviews in order to feed back lessons learned.
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