Nigel Grainger brings together a related set of skills that all fleets require, to greater or lesser
degrees, but which may not have the staffing or the skills to fulfil those needs.
Bringing his wealth of experience in all areas of fleet management he offers a bespoke service through his company Fleet Risk Consultants, providing you with a cost effective fleet that complies fully with your 'duty of care' requirements.Corporate Manslaughter Legislation – Vehicles
The Corporate Manslaughter Legislation as we have discussed previously puts a number of challenges in front of business owners and directors. A key part of those challenges is the vehicles that are used by the staff in connection with the business.
The vehicles have to be roadworthy and fit for purpose, the responsibility for this lies with both the company and the driver alike. So how do YOU ensure that the vehicles your staff are driving are legal, the good news is you don’t need to be a mechanic to achieve a satisfactory level of compliance.
What you need is a robust system of checks on the vehicles and a double check system to ensure that your checking system is working. The system has been working in the truck industry for many years now and if used correctly will provide you and your business with a defence in court should something go wrong.
The system is a NIL defect return on a monthly basis in conjunction with a defect report system when a defect is found. This means that you will have 12 returns per year per vehicle, plus defect reports as necessary. It is a simple as that.
The NIL defect return tells the driver the items on his/her vehicle that needs to be checked and they complete the return to show the mileage and whether there is or is not a defect. This is signed, with a failure to complete the form considered as part of your disciplinary process. The items to check are similar to those we discussed yesterday and should take no more than 10 minutes per day to complete. You could even do the checks whilst waiting for your vehicle to demist on these cooler mornings.
The defect report form does exactly that it reports the defects on your vehicle to your manager so that they can get your vehicle repaired. You may replace a blown bulb on your vehicle yourself, but you should still report the defect, because we know vehicles have defects and if there are none shown, it may indicate that drivers are just paying lip service to your system.
The double check system falls into two parts. The first one is to get a local tyre company to visit your premises once a month and carry out a tyre check of all the vehicles in your car park, even the ones not used for business. The vehicles not used for business are driven by valued employees (you wouldn’t have employed them if they weren’t valued) and you care about their well being even if you have no legal responsibility for that vehicle. The best bit about this is that the tyre company will do this for FREE, yes that is correct I did say FREE. They would of course appreciate your business should any tyres be required.
The other check system is the regular service that cars receive. Every vehicle on the road should be serviced at least once every 12 months by a competent mechanic, who should stamp the service book for that vehicle. High mileage vehicles will be serviced more often. All vehicles used in connection with your business should have the service book checked and copied every year, when you check the insurance certificate is a good time to do this.
If you are not running a system like the one I have described and a vehicle driven in connection with your business is involved in a fatal collision and that vehicle is defective in any way, you could find yourself being arrested and questioned under the Corporate Manslaughter Legislation.
If you have read my previous articles you will know how bad that can be.
Fleet Risk Consultants can help you set up the system and help you get your staff to understand how to operate the system. Please get in contact with us and see how we can help YOU.
Nigel Grainger
Senior Consultant