Driving for Better Business, the National Highways business engagement programme, has launched a series of free monthly resources to help fleets ensure driver and vehicle compliance.
Designed for fleet managers to share with their drivers, the Fleet Focus guides will cover areas ranging from driver fatigue and distraction, and drug/drink driving, through to weather conditions and winter preparation, safe loading, and mental health and driver wellbeing.
The series starts with vehicle roadworthiness, helping managers, supervisors and everyone else involved to understand their responsibilities.
Mark Cartwright, head of commercial vehicle incident prevention at National Highways, said: “There are many vehicles on our roads that are simply not roadworthy. Up to a third of all vans will fail an MOT on first inspection – the main failures being on lights, tyres, suspensions or brakes. These are critical to safety, and if they are not given a cursory check before an MOT, are they being checked at all?
“As managers of those who drive for work, we should take steps to ensure our drivers are safe when driving. That includes checking the vehicle is in a safe and roadworthy condition of course.”
The guide looks at creating a good practice vehicle roadworthiness policy; ensuring drivers are carrying out competent pre-use checks; making sure any issues are reported and recorded; and the legal responsibilities of both the driver and the operator.
To make the monthly guides easy to share with drivers, each topic includes posters that can be printed for noticeboards, and short reminders to be fed to in-cab messaging systems.
Each month’s topic sits in a library, allowing anyone to access a bank of resources at any time to help improve driver safety.
“Everything we offer is free of charge and can be downloaded and used as many times as relevant,” stressed Cartwright. “These will help deliver significant benefits, both for the companies and their employees.”
To access the monthly Fleet Focus guides, please click here.
