Britain’s Department of Transport, Highways England and numerous insurance company representatives have hosted a Driving for Work Summit in a bid to encourage initiatives be taken up by employers in order to minimise occupational road crashes.
The Driving for Work Summit is a precursor to a major new work-related safety campaign due to be launched in the UK’s spring (our autumn), called Driving for Better Business (DfBB), aimed at promoting safer driving practices in fleet management and occupational road use.
Companies to get on board with the umbrella DfBB campaign include (but are not limited to) 3M, TNT, Tesco, Royal Mail, ING, LeasePlan, Johnson & Johnson, Michelin and General Motors (which owns Vauxhall and Opel). Many smaller or lesser-known businesses to Australia are also involved.
“Around a third of road traffic colluisions involve a person at work,” said RoadSafe executive director Adrian Walsh. “So there is clearly more that can be cone by public and private sector fleets working together and in tandem with employers’ organisations, government and its agencies, and road safety experts to support and promote good practice.”
RoadSafe is a supporting organisation working with Highways England to execute the DfBB campaign.
Supermarket giant 
Tesco recognised its 7000-plus drivers and home delivery vans, totalling around 2200 in June 2008, were involved in its excessively high accident rate. Given those vehicles covers roughly 60 million miles (96.5 million kms) and had a network covering 98 per cent of the UK’s population, something had to be done.
Through a number of programs, including driver training, education and alliance with the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), saw mass reductions across the board.
Other road safety organisations included Health and Safety Executive, HDI Global, IAM , RoadSmart, Thatcham Research, Transport Research Laboratory, Transort Safety Commission and Zurich Insurance.
Ideas discussed at the Summit will bolster the upcoming campaign which targets the Transport Safety Commission’s March 2015 report called “Transport Safety: Who Is Responsible?” and the government’s Working Together to Build a Safer Road System statement from December 2015.
“Our new programme is intended to accelerate the uptake of road safety initiatives by major fleets and SMEs operating company cars, grey fleet and light vans to reduce the number of collisions involving drivers on business journeys,” Walsh said.
This article was sourced from fleetnews.co.uk, full story here.
