Health and safety law applies to work on the road in exactly the same way as it applies on your premises. It covers your employee’s own car. And in most businesses, nobody has been made responsible for any of it.
Employer guide
Grey fleet, duty of care, and what gets asked after an incident.
Operators with an O-licence tend to manage HGV compliance carefully, because somebody is named on the licence and the consequences are obvious. The car park is a different story.
The sales rep in her own Golf, the manager driving to a site meeting, the engineer with a van and a cash allowance — those journeys carry a legal duty that is almost identical in principle, and in most organisations nobody has been given the job.
The HSE could not be plainer about it: health and safety law applies to work activities on the road in the same way as it does on a fixed site, and it applies to both company and grey fleet vehicles.
You would not let an employee use an unmaintained machine on your premises. A car is a machine.
The duty is not discharged by the fact that the vehicle belongs to them, that they hold a licence, or that the Road Traffic Act already regulates the road. Those are their obligations. Yours is separate and sits alongside.
A grey fleet vehicle is one owned and driven by a worker for business purposes. If you pay a cash allowance instead of providing a car, that is grey fleet too — the money changing hands does not move the duty.
Ordinary commuting — home to a usual place of work — is outside it. Everything done in the course of work is inside, whether the vehicle is yours or theirs.
Most organisations underestimate their grey fleet badly, because it never appears on an asset register. Ask how many people claimed business mileage last year. That number is your fleet.
Not a glance at a photocard. The DVLA record shows entitlement, endorsements and disqualifications. A photocard shows a photograph.
This is the one that catches people. Ordinary social, domestic and pleasure cover does not extend to business use. An employee driving to a client on the strength of a standard policy may simply be uninsured. Ask for the certificate and read what it says.
Both are checkable in seconds against DVSA and DVLA records. There is no good reason to be taking anyone’s word for it.
An MOT is a snapshot from up to a year ago. Tyres, lights and brakes change. Drivers need a simple route to report a defect on their own vehicle without feeling they are volunteering for an argument about money.
Then record all four, with dates, and repeat them on a stated cycle. An undocumented check is worth nothing when someone asks you to produce it.
Driving is usually the most dangerous thing your employees do, and it is routinely the one activity missing from the risk assessments. It should cover the driver, the vehicle and the journey — competence and health, condition and suitability, distance and timing.
It does not need to be long. It needs to exist, to be specific to how your people actually travel, and to be reviewed when something changes.
This is where duty of care is most often breached without anyone deciding to breach it.
If the diary has someone in Leeds at nine and Birmingham at eleven, the schedule has made the decision for them. The same applies to the sales visit added at four in the afternoon three hours away, and the return leg after a full working day.
Could this be done, lawfully and safely, by a driver who obeys every limit and takes reasonable breaks? If the honest answer is no, the schedule is the hazard — not the driver who was late.
Fatigue does not respect the fact that someone is not a professional driver. Nor does a phone call taken on the move, which is worth a written policy that says plainly what is expected and is applied to managers as visibly as to everyone else.
The questions are entirely predictable, which is what makes being unable to answer them so damaging:
Every one of those is answerable in a sentence if you keep records, and unanswerable if you do not. The exposure lands on the organisation and, where the failure is serious enough, on named individuals in it.
Not indifference. Ownership.
An O-licence names a transport manager, so somebody owns the problem. Driving for work usually sits between HR, health and safety, fleet and finance — which means it sits with nobody, and it surfaces only after something has happened.
Name the person responsible. Write down the four checks and when they repeat. Do the risk assessment. Then keep the evidence somewhere it can be produced. That is most of it, and it can be done in a fortnight.
Our free driving-for-work self-audit runs through 64 questions across eight areas and gives you a score with the gaps listed — a fair picture of where you stand in about ten minutes.
If you would rather have someone look at it properly, that is what we do: licence checking, driver risk assessment, policy and a documented system that survives being asked for. And where the same people also drive vehicles on an O-licence, DDIR keeps both sets of evidence in one place from £1 per vehicle per week.
