A health and safety expert has called for legal measures that will force
employers to introduce risk management measures to protect company drivers.
Roger Bibbings, an occupational health adviser for the Royal Society for the
Prevention of Accidents (Rospa), said car and van drivers covering more than
25,000 miles a year for their job were more likely to die at work than coal
miners.
Rospa said one in eight people driving this distance a year will die while
at work. This compares with deep-sea fishermen, whose mortality rate is one in
750 and coal miners at one in 7,100.
Bibbings said fatigue was the biggest contributor to road-related deaths and
was responsible for more deaths than alcohol.
He thinks companies should be legally obliged to introduce safety measures
for those who drive long hours in their jobs.
These could include encouraging the use of other forms of transport,
specifying safest routes, setting journey time and distance limits, selecting
vehicles with additional safety features and driver assessment.
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Bibbings said many drivers fear reporting accidents to their companies,
which is obscuring the scale of the problem.
"Managing risk on road cannot be achieved by one-off interventions –
organisations need to have policies, people and procedures in place," he
said.
