How to improve off-road safety on your site

Did you know that vehicles in the workplace are a major cause of fatalities and serious injuries? According to the Health and Safety Executive every year there are over 5000 incidents that involve transport in the workplace.

Every year some 50 incidents resulting in people losing their lives. The main causes of injury are people or goods falling off vehicles, or being accidently struck or crushed by them. Being struck by a moving vehicle accounted for 31 fatal injuries to UK workers in 2016/17.

If you’re a business owner or manager working in the road haulage industry or in the logistics industry, have you recently audited your site to make sure any transport accidents at work are prevented or kept to an absolute minimum?

As an employer you have a legal duty to ensure that the health and safety of all your
employees, and any contractors or third parties you might have working on site are not put at risk. Every measure that improves the safety of transport in your workplace also has the potential to improve your insurance risk and keep your insurance policy costs to a minimum.

According to HSE, to manage workplace transport effectively, there are three aspects to consider when carrying out your risk assessment:

1. Site safety; this involves site design to manage and maintain traffic routes on site, crossing points for pedestrians, lighting and signage.
2. Vehicle safety; involves loading and unloading vehicles, tipping, coupling and uncoupling, reversing and sheeting.
3. Driver safety; making sure drivers are competent and aware of the required safe behaviours.

HSE provides a very comprehensive guide: www.hse.gov.uk/workplacetransport

Ask your broker to help you review road safety practice in your workplace and support you to further protect your employees and contractors on site.

At Andrew Bourne and Co, we have an ever-expanding library of HSE safety resources, making it easy for us to support businesses. We spend time getting to know how your commercial haulage operation works and with many years’ experience in commercial haulage and logistics, we offer specialist expertise in assessing and mitigating risks. If you’d like to speak to us, call David Crowther or one of the team at Andrew Bourne and Co. on 0116 272 0770.