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Posted By Tina J Ambler
I am looking for examples of Driving Policy especially with regard to driving convictions and what action is taken when an employee gets to 9 points on his/her licence.
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Posted By Nick House
Are you notifying your insurers of the penalty points accrued by your drivers? Might be worth having a chat with them.
Also, if your drivers are accumulating this amount of penalty points, then it might be worth looking at their attitude, as well as the time between offences.
It might be worthwhile putting them on a driver awareness course. That way, when you receive the report back, you will be better placed to assess their attitude.
I'd also be tempted to up the frequency of the licence checks, as fleet managers (or the person responsible for managing the fleets/ checking the licences) will also be liable for fines and or pointe on their licence if it is discovered that they have an unlicenced driver on their fleet.
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Posted By Ken Dickson
"I'd also be tempted to up the frequency of the licence checks, as fleet managers (or the person responsible for managing the fleets/ checking the licences) will also be liable for fines and or pointe on their licence if it is discovered that they have an unlicenced driver on their fleet."
Nick,
That ventures into an area that could be interesting. Can you give some more information on this, or references that i could investigate.
Thanks, Ken
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Posted By Adrian Watson
Dear Tina,
In addition to the above, I would also investigate to ascertain whether there are personal, work or organisational factors that result in the behaviour leading to the points being awarded.
Regards Adrian Watson
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Posted By Merv Newman
Does an employer have a legal right to request disclosure of convictions ?
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Posted By Brett Day
Merv
If a company car, then yes an employer does have the right as they are insuring the car and they have a duty to thier insurers. Employees with a comopany car have a duty to co-operate under the t&c's of the insurance.
I know of one company that on the weekly mileage sheet each engineer had to submit a declaration that stated:
I have not to the best of my knowledge commited any offences under the road traffic act (including parking offences) and have not been involved in any accidents, in the last seven days. Should I become aware of any endorsments I will contact the fleet administrator as soon as reasonable.
I'm not sure what was meant by a driving awarness course but certainly a driver assessment possibly followed by training as appropriate by the likes of IAM Fleet might be more suitable.
Many insureres and fleet companies will give discounts if drivers are assessed and trained by a recognised body. Your fleet company should be able to help.
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Posted By Brett Day
As a side issue, I've investigated a few accident involving company car drivers and about half involved as a factor the company making unrealistic demands in terms of time and distance covered.
Maybe not applicable but might be worth looking at if the bulk of car drivers are racking up points.
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Posted By Nick House
I've just found out that you need to be registered to be able to open th elink, so incase anyone is having difficulty with this, here's a c&p of the article.
Regards
Nick.
"FLEET managers will end up paying for their drivers’ offences if they fail to make sure they are licensed to drive.
Although drivers will incur fines and penalty points for driving offences while disqualified, if the employee is on business at the time, those directly responsible for the vehicles are also punished. This means a fleet manager will get points and a fine if one of their drivers is convicted of certain offences.
Tony Round, head of sales for the Licence Bureau, has warned delegates that as more drivers were being convicted of speeding offences, there was an increasing danger of employees driving while banned.
He said: ‘The person responsible for checking the licence is also the person responsible for getting penalty points. At one company, someone has got six points on his licence because two of his drivers didn’t have a licence.’
The rules, contained within the Road Traffic Act 1988, are much more likely to affect fleet managers as drivers incur rocketing numbers of penalties.
Round said that in Northamptonshire alone, 4,000 drivers were convicted of speeding in 1999, but that had rocketed to 104,000 by 2001 and was now averaging 85,000 a year.
He added: ‘The number of disqualified drivers is creeping up, so checking licences is increasingly important.’"
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Posted By Tina J Ambler
Thank you for your replies.
Nick
Yes we do inform the insurers if there are any excessive penalty points.
All drivers undertake an on-line driver risk assessment, the results of which will determine whether they undergo Driver Assessment Training. Licence checks at present are undertaken on a 12 monthly basis. However, looking at the responses we may need to review the frequency of the licence checks.
The article you have c&p'd is very interesting, I wasn't aware that the Fleet Manager would incur the points and fine. Am I reading it correctly that this will only happen where the offender does not hold a licence themselves?
Going back to my original question, I was looking to compare what we did with other Companies.
When an employee reaches 9 points on their driving licence, their Managers will call them in for a meeting which will be recorded and they will undergo further Driver Training depending on the nature of the convictions.
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Posted By Nick House
Tina - As far as I can ascertain after trawling through my of both the RTA 1988 and the RTOA 1988, you are correct in assuming that this would only be the case should a driver be caught without a current full driving licence.
Depending on the size of your fleet, I would consider upping the licence check frequency to perhaps quarterly.
Also, if you have a fleet running into hundreds or thousands, would it not be possible for the relevant department managers to carry out licence checks within their teams, with each manager reporting their findings back to a central point.
As long as you have an audit trail, then I would suggest that this would be OK.
Regards
Nick.
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Posted By J Knight
Eeyoop chaps,
Just got back from Mexico, and if you want to know about driving just watch what the Mexicans do, and don't do it!
9 points is much too late to start the discussion. There needs to be some kind of formal process whenever anybody gets a speeding conviction at work; speeding indicates an unwillingness or inability to properly control the vehicle and is a fairly reliable indicator of accident risk. Of course there need to be company policies which deter speeding in supportive as well as punitive ways; we for example explicitly state that we expect people to be late for appointments rather than break the limit.
We have recently had a thorough MORR review from RoSPA which we are stille assimilating, and this has indicated the level of checking we need to undertake, both for fleet drivers and for people driving their own car. It is fairly onerous, but without taking hours to transcribe the report, I can tell you that the processes we have been recommended are based on case law and statements issued by the regulators. Something to remember when carrying out licence checks is that, according to one of the organisations which tendered for the review, between 5 and 10 per cent of licences are invalid. This can be a technical invalidity (wrong address for example) or downright fraud, but their suggested approach is that all licences should be valildated with DVLA,
John
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Posted By Frank Hallett
Why is this so new?
It's always the employers responsibility to ensure that their employees are competent and follow the rules - in this case the Road Traffic legislation. It's only since the HSE have got the various disparate groups of Police, Revenue, Social Security to join with them to present an integrated approach [last 5 years] that it's actually had any real success. Hopefully the application of H&S legislation to driving at work won't be long in coming- all it needs is a little bit of political will.
We worry about killing about 300 people a year on average in a fixed workplace but fail to raise a sweat over the average 3000 deaths per year on the roads with an undetermined [but alleged to be considerable by the organisations that keep records] percentage of drivers at work directly implicated - bizarre & inconsistent to say the least.
Ensuring that persons driving on the employers business are competent and perform safely has been with us for some time, it's only now that the RTA and others cannot ignore or avoid it any more that they're now trying to lead the procession. Driving at work history of the last 15 years is littered with spectacular cases of drivers and employers being prosecuted for all the things identified above - especially failing to maintain adequate control over the workload of the driver.
If you worry about getting points 'cos your driver wasn't properly supervised; then watch out for the real pain of being prosecuted for failing to implement the range of applicable H&S legilation that applies.
Frank Hallett
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