Driving for Better Business—a UK initiative to assist employers in the commercial and public sector minimise the risks associated with work-related driving, reduce costs and keep up-to-date with current legislation—have shared some results directly from its online risk assessment database.
The data shared focussed on what you might expect to be a straightforward question for fleet operators to answer: “Do you know how many drivers you have?” Despite the question seeming simple enough, only 71% answered, “yes”, but that left 29%, almost a third, who didn’t know.
To be fair, answering this question is easier if a specific company vehicle is assigned to a single driver, which might be the case for some fleets. Though in other instances the same vehicle is used for multiple shifts and many drivers have access to the same van, for example. In companies using the so-called grey fleets or with staff utilising their own cars, the answer is anything but simple.
This apparently easy-to-answer question is a very important one. If companies do not know the number of drivers with exactitude, they cannot demonstrate that drivers are managed efficiently or are familiar with fleet policy, and not all of the drivers’ licences will have probably been checked, meaning companies are ultimately not 100% sure that their drivers are eligible to do the job.
When asked how many have checked licences directly with the DVLA, the answer was, again, 71% —probably roughly the same 71% that were confident how many drivers are in their employ. As most will know, checking licences highlights a number of potential issues, including the eligibility of drivers to drive different types of vehicles as well as any potential health problems.
It might surprise people to learn that only half (50%) of those answering bother to check any medical issues that could compromise driving ability, which would indicate that most of the checks are cursory and focussed primarily on penalty points.
Still less, just over a third of companies (38%), carry out any formal assessment of driver competency prior to engaging them in work-related driving, with 14% looking to do so at some point. This is quite astonishing if we were to consider this statistic applied to staff who were expected to operate machinery in a factory environment or operate in an industry involving a degree of risk—in other words, why should operating commercially on public highways, in whatever capacity, be considered less hazardous than the aforementioned activities.
