Safety drive reaps rewards

Royal Mail has established one of the world’s largest occupational road risk management programmes, earning the firm business champion status under the UK government-backed Driving for Better Business campaign, reports Business Car. More than 50,000 of the company’s 90,000 drivers have completed risk assessment forms over the past 18 months, and it has spent £10m on speed limiters and in-vehicle telematics for its 30,000 vans. The firm also runs 5500 company cars, has 10,000 grey fleet drivers, 2100 larger vans and 1500 HGVs.

Royal Mail is claiming to have slashed £5.5m from its accident costs, while the incident rate has dropped by more than 25%.

“The specific driver programme enables the group to identify employees who are ‘at risk’ and assist them,” said Royal Mail technical safety manager Melvyn Hodgetts. “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.”