MADAM – I recently had a jaw-dropping moment about health and safety.

The more I think about it the more I am aghast that our state isn’t protecting workers from the single biggest cause of accidents – driving at work.

The RAC Foundation suggests that “Up to 1 in 3 road crashes involves a vehicle being driven for work”.

(1) The reported number of deaths nationally on the road appears to be in the region of 1,800 a year.

(2) The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) through employer accident reporting has recorded 133 deaths at work in 2013/14.

(3) I naively assumed that the accident report by employers included death on the road while at work.

This is not the case, and the most recent legislation specifically excludes the recording of motoring deaths at work – which is perhaps as many as 600 deaths a year not treated as deaths at work, meaning that perhaps as high as five in six deaths is not recorded as a death involving a worker.

Similar issues apply to serious injuries and absences from work.

A complexity in the statistics is that the risk is not just workers themselves but to others road users, and not all of the 600 deaths are workers at work.

Why should this matter?

Workers here doesn’t just refer to HGV drivers or the lovely ‘white van man’ but includes executives and others driving both company cars and their own cars for work.

Evidence suggests that people who are driving for work are far more likely to be to blame for accidents.

Both national and local road safety statistics do not reflect the shocking impact of work keeping death on the roads and is far more serious than drink-driving (but just as preventable).

Where a driver has broken the law of the road it is right and proper they are prosecuted in the courts, but a potential gap in the current approach would appear that the neglectful employer allowing or even worse encouraging a poor health and safety culture will not be investigated.

For example, there are specific health and safety rules covering night-time working. (4) Where a worker dies, is seriously injured or causes a death or serious injury in a night-time incident then surely it should be automatic to refer this to the individual health and safety enforcing authority for investigation to ensure this isn’t part of a pattern with a particular employer.

Another example could be where a poorly maintained vehicle is identified.

Is this a one-off issue or part of a poor safety culture of the employer?

My assumption was that this was just a glaring omission, but it is clear this is a deliberate policy not to enforce the health and safety laws in relation to accidents on the road.

And this is not a new callous disregard for workplace safety as organisations like RoSPA have been working on the subject for 20 years.

When I discovered this gap in enforcement I assumed that this was just poor co-ordination by the police.

It is clear that they and other road safety partners are seeking to close the gap.

Suzette Davenport happens to be the ACPO Roads Policing lead, and her ACPO team in their response to me have highlighted a statement as recent as November 27 from Kevin Myers, deputy CEO of the Health and Safety Executive, who said: “Our policy, and it’s a long-standing policy for government, given the nature of our legislation, is that we should not seek to get involved and apply the Health and Safety at Work Act and its legislation if there is more bespoke legislation covering particular risks, and that generally works across the piece.”

Given that UK health and safety legislation translates European protections for workers the question arises whether Britain has done enough to comply with Article 9 of the Directive 89/311 on the introduction of measures to encourage improvements in the safety and health of workers at work. (5) A question I have put to our Euro MPs.

What is clear is that this head-in-the-sand approach to effective enforcement to people at work on the road is health and safety gone mad.

(1) http://www.racfoundation.org/motoring-faqs/safety#a8

(2) http://www.rospa.com/faqs/detail.aspx?faq=296

(3) http://www.hse.gov.uk/statistics/overall/hssh1314.pdf

(4) https://www.gov.uk/night-working-hours/hours-and-limits

(5) http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:01989L0391-20081211&from=EN/

Chas Townley

Stroud