Health and safety statistics regarding work-related car accidents

While researching a health and safety news item regarding car accidents and work this morning, I came across a rather startling fact that shocked me, and unable as I was to bring comment into the news item, I can now look at this fact and discuss it in more detail.

I have worked for a personal injury solicitor's firm for several months and have become conversant with many aspects of health and safety law and procedure, and the fact that appalled me this morning was that current legislation regarding road traffic accidents involving someone who is driving as part of their job does not require the incident to be recorded as a work-related accident.

Estimates suggest that one in three road traffic accidents involve a vehicle being driven for work. Potentially, 200 people could be killed or seriously injured in work-related car accidents on UK roads every week. These figures are not recorded; they melt into the pot of road safety statistics with no thought to work induced contributory factors that may have adversely affected the driver of the vehicle, such as stress caused by high sales targets, long journey times, or working and driving alone.

In October 2008 a Work and Pensions Select Committee Inquiry rejected calls for work-related car accidents to be recordable under the Reporting of Incidents, Diseases, and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR).

Ray Hurst, president of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health (IOSH) said, "Work-related road deaths are a gaping hole in our health and safety recording. The fatal injury statistics we get are just for workplace accidents they don't include work-related road deaths, and we believe there are between 800 and 1,000 of them each year."

Rick Wood, head of training in the Driver & Fleet Solutions Department at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA), cites driving as the most dangerous thing that many people do in the course of their working lives. RoSPA have developed the Managing Occupational Road Risk Review (MORR) as a tool for all businesses that manage fleet vehicles to increase risk awareness and to emphasize the importance of training and development strategies for drivers.

Personally, I can't quite grasp the notion that if a road traffic accident that causes death or serious injury is caused by a driver during the course of his working day, that it is not investigated and logged as a matter of health and safety course. As a regular viewer/reader of the news and of programmes of the "Police, Camera, Action" ilk, I regularly witness the reported carnage associated with motorway pile-ups and it is with depressing frequency that the perpetrators of the accidents are driving a commercial vehicle. In my legislative naivety, I presumed that commercial practices of such drivers would be investigated with reference to the driving habits of their job, but it appears that if they are to be prosecuted, it would be as an ordinary road user.

Of-course, I am in no way suggesting that the commercial criteria of a driver should be used as a means by which not to prosecute dangerous driving, but it appears, to me, to be madness that these cases are not investigated for their health and safety repercussions and are not recorded statistically to separate them from non-work-related car accidents. If I had lost a loved one due to the lack of attention from a salesman at the end of a twelve hour day covering hundreds of miles, I think I might have something to say regarding the practices of that person's employer and their management of occupational road risk.

Long hours and high mileage should never be an excuse in a work-related car accident. If managed properly, it should just never be an accident.

Can I claim?