Fleet Insurance H.A.D. Safety Program-Why Companies Need To Adopt It

London, UK ( openpr ) March 04, 2011 - In February 2011 the first company in Great Britain was convicted of corporate manslaughter, under the then comparatively New Act. The case of 27 year old Alex Wright, a geologist who died in a trench in 2008, while employed by Cotswold Geotechnical Holdings made history. Whatever type of company you run this is not the type of history you wish to make, no doubt. This article is the first in a series to assist companies to focus on improving fleet safety by adopting a fleet insurance company initiative-the Heightened Awareness Driving (H.A.D.) Safety Program.

Even before the launch of the H.A.D. Safety Program, quite a number of organisations have been taking action to improve how their employees are driving for work with a strong focus on training company drivers. Success for such a program has been found to be directly linked to the methods used to select drivers. Additionally like training of any nature, repetition and frequency are vital ingredients.

Let’s Look At Some Fleet Safety Data

90% of incidents are as a result of human error and safety initiatives need to be consistently sustained in which they are required to involve change of culture in order to ensure that improved behaviours are consistently maintained.

Organisations are mandated to take reasonable and practical steps that will assist them to manage safe driving habits whereby failure to follow this may result in tough penalties with exorbitant fines, custodial sentences for executives & employees, and negative publicity for the organization.

Due to the magnitude of reckless driving, the government has placed responsibility on the business owners and its executives to find ways of improving on their employee’s road safety. Organisations are also required to undertake fleet insurance.

Despite road transport safety improvement technologies over the previous year, driving for work has been cited as one of the most dangerous activities an individual can undertake as part of their daily office duties whereby driving for work has claimed approximately 75% of workplace related deaths annually.

Last year alone 28,000 people died and 40,000 were seriously injured on British roads. Of these statistics, 33% of these incidents involved individuals driving for work. Apart from the highly tragic results of these incidents, they also had an economic impact which has been estimated at a cost to the economy of £1.6bn every year.

Where Can We Begin To Resolve These Serious Fleet Safety Issues?

Driving for work is by its nature a very complex subject, which is best split into 3 different aspects in order to tackle it:

- Journey
- Vehicle
- Driver

Each of these areas has to be properly managed and this challenge can be assisted by following the H.A.D. Safety Program, which can make your job somewhat easier.

Fleet And Company Legal Responsibilities

Organisations that have employees driving for them have a number of abiding responsibilities which they are required to undertake in addition to duties that employers are mandated under road traffic acts administered by the police and VOSA.

There are some specific requirements binding the professional drivers such as those driving passenger vehicles and large goods vehicles. This series of articles is going to dwell on regulations that bind non-professional drivers like the:

- Own vehicle driver
- Company van driver (Below 3.5 tones)
- Company car drivers

When the series of articles which makes up the H.A.D. Safety Program have all been released over time, the complete set in the form of an e-book will be available to download for the fleet insurance ( http://www.cover4fleetinsurance.co.uk ) company’s website blog.

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This release was published on openPR.