Royal Mail Driving for Better Business champion
One of the world’s largest occupational road risk management programmes has been established by Royal Mail Group and earned the organisation ‘business champion’ status under the Government-backed ‘Driving for Better Business’ campaign, which is delivered by RoadSafe.
While, road safety has always been a part of Royal Mail Group’s duty of care policy it has been given a massive new focus over the last 18 months with more than 50,000 of the organisation’s 90,000 drivers completing risk assessments in possibly the largest programme of its type in the world.
In addition, there has been an investment of more than £10 million to-date in fitting speed limiters and in-vehicle telemetry to the fleet of almost 30,000 iconic red vans that criss-cross the UK collecting and delivering mail.
Across the Group the organisation also runs more than 2,100 light goods vehicles between 6.5 and 7.5 tonnes, 1,500 HGVs and 5,500 company cars and up to 10,000 employees drive their own cars on business trips.
Collectively across Royal Mail Group - the parent company of Royal Mail, Post Office Ltd and Parcelforce Worldwide - there are some 90,000 drivers travelling 605 million miles each year, delivering to 28 million addresses in the UK.
An estimated up to 200 road deaths and serious injuries a week result from crashes involving at work drivers, and more employees are killed and seriously injured on Britain’s roads while driving on behalf of their employer than in any other work-related activity.
The aim of the ‘Driving for Better Business’ campaign is to raise awareness of the importance of work-related road safety in the private and public sector by using ‘business champions’ to promote the benefits of managing it effectively.
Royal Mail Group is the latest and largest of almost 40 organisations to join the campaign to date and Melvyn Hodgetts, Technical Safety Manager at Royal Mail, said: “Road safety is a major challenge and is rightly a number one priority. With such a large and distinctive fleet, we have a responsibility to make sure we provide a safe environment for our people and the communities in which we operate.”
As a result of the business’s at-work driving programme, which is being championed at board level, latest data shows that crash costs have been slashed by almost £5.5 million and the incident rate has dropped by more than a quarter.
The Group’s multi-faceted safe driving strategy embraces drivers, vehicles and journeys as well as the company’s culture and the wider community.
As well as road safety ownership at board level, Operational Area Safety Managers have been appointed this year on to each Area Leadership Team to drive safety related initiatives and to ensure best practise is shared across the organisation.
Mr Hodgetts said: “Royal Mail Group is one of the first fleet operators in the UK to show road safety programme leadership on such a large scale.”
The unprecedented range and scope of the Group’s initiatives so far include:
The largest electronic driver licence validity programme in Europe - and possibly the world - with 11,500 checked to date and a further 78,500 to be checked over the next four years. These checks support six-monthly physical licence checks
All new vans speed limited to 70 mph with more than 18,000 existing vans retrospectively fitted with speed limiters
Employees taking a ‘safe driving pledge’ and being put through risk awareness modules to ensure that staff comply with handbooks, policies and procedures
All 90,000 employees who drive on business whether an operational vehicle, company car, hire car or their own completing a risk assessment over a three-to-five-year period
After the risk assessment stage, it is mandatory for all drivers, irrespective of their risk rating, to undertake two online safety improvement interventions to give all drivers some valuable safe driving tips and a basic level of training.
Driver training - with more than 50 behind-the-wheel courses available for drivers and managers from expert to novice with relevant courses targeted at staff depending on the outcome of collision analysis, risk assessment, induction and management requests. In 2008/9 almost 8,000 drivers completed training courses
The establishment of a Transport Safety Steering Group comprising safety and operational experts from across the Group to ensure a consistent and robust approach to safe driving
A post-collision process that sees incidents involving a serious injury or fatality notified to senior management and thoroughly investigated
All members of the board of Royal Mail Vehicle Services, which is responsible for the cradle-to-grave life cycle management of vehicles, have completed driver risk assessments and attended an improving driving skills training intervention course to show leadership by example
Messages promoting safe driving distributed to 170,000 Royal Mail Group employees through their pay slips and a variety of other communication means.
Collectively, the initiatives have so far resulted in a 70% reduction in ‘harsh’ braking and a 61% cut in ‘speeding events’ as measured by the in-vehicle telemetry and a 30% cut in fatalities and a 20% reduction in incidents involving the more than 8,000 vehicles so far fitted with telematics.
Mr Hodgetts said: “The specific driver programme enables the Group to identify employees who are ‘at risk’ and assist them. By using the outputs from the risk assessment and cross-matching this against licence endorsements and incident data we can determine any incident pattern and the best training intervention for individual employees.
“The use of telemetry in our vehicles is enabling us to see how the vehicles are being driven, if they are speeding or if they are continually harsh-braking. Where these behaviours are observed, necessary interventions can be utilised to change behaviours.
“With the introduction of telemetry to the fleet we are also better able to utilise our vehicles and determine the best routes to use. This is helping to reduce the probability of vehicle collisions and injuries to people as the initiative is resulting in fewer actual vehicles on the road doing less miles. Also with regards to journey management, our collision analysis is identifying hot spots at our own locations requiring more detailed site risk assessments.”
In introducing the myriad of initiatives, Royal Mail Group says that communicating directly with drivers and their union representatives has been crucial through meetings, questionnaires and the evaluation of pilot projects.
Caroline Scurr, director of the ‘Driving for Better Business’ campaign, said: “Royal Mail Group has made huge strides in recent years to raise awareness of the importance of safe driving across the organisation.
“With Royal Mail Group being such a high profile organisation I am confident that the commitment it has made to encouraging safe driving through its various initiatives will give a major impetus to the campaign and encourage other like-minded organisations to follow its lead.”
