Airmic Talks: Moving fleet up the risk register

Discussing fleet risk on the latest episode of Airmic Talks, Ms Moriarty said fleet often either isn’t on the risk register at all or is very low down and pointed to the fact a third of fatal collisions on the road and a quarter of serious injury collisions are caused by people driving for work.

“If you talk to companies with heavy goods vehicles, they’re not understanding that the biggest risk to their business is probably having their O-licence revoked or curtailed by the traffic commissioner,” she said.

“It’s a significant risk and that disparity between how we view occupational safety and fleet safety we need to get a grip of and ensure they have the same gravitas. It’s not just your crash damage, third party claims, personal injury but reputational damage is a huge one.”

Mr Cartwright said commercial vehicles are massive users of the roads network and that usage, both number of vehicles and mileage, is only increasing.

“The simple message is driving is an ‘at work activity’, therefore it’s a health and safety issue and so the Health and Safety at Work Act still applies,” he said. “But almost every day of the week I work with organisations where it is absolutely obvious that they don’t attach the same health and safety importance to what is going on on the roads as they do to their factories, within their offices and production facilities.”

To listen to the full conversation between Ms Moriarty and Mr Cartwright, and all previous episodes of the podcast, search for ‘Airmic Talks’ on Apple Podcasts, CastBox, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts from.