We were Highly Commended in this year’s Safety and Health Excellence (SHE) Awards for Best Driver Risk Management Performance. Sponsored by National Highways, the awards attracted more than 400 entries, across 16 award categories - promoting the importance of health and safety innovation and underlying the highest standards of excellence.
As the accolade has now been published as a case study by Driving for Better Business, John Wilkinson, Northern Powergrid’s Driver Safety and Performance Manager explains why…
Safety and driving safely is a key priority for our business as we manage the electricity network for 3.9million homes and businesses, which equates to 8 million customers across the North East, Yorkshire and northern Lincolnshire. That’s no mean feat in terms of empowering our colleagues to safely perform their role; maintaining our network of overhead power lines, cables and substations as a 24/7 business, in all weather conditions.
With a fleet size of 49 heavy goods vehicles, over 1,000 commercial vans, 20 electric commercial vans, 19 hybrid electric commercial vans, 13 electric cars and over 1,200 grey fleet cars belonging to employees and used for business travel to carry out their duties – colleagues have collectively driven over 15 million miles per year. In the past ten years, that figure totals over 200 million miles.
Adding another feather to our fleet safety hat, our vehicle collisions are down by 10.7% in just 12 months, CO2 emissions down by 6.4% and we’ve had no staff absences relating to driving incidents in 2023.
Holding an Order of Distinction by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents (RoSPA) for achieving twenty-three consecutive years of Gold safety awards in our Northeast licence area, and twenty years of Gold safety awards in our Yorkshire area, we have also achieved specialist Gold Awards for Fleet Safety in both licence areas.
Our colleagues work hard to keep safety as their main focus, recognising that driving is one of the most high-risk activities that they do.
We want to reduce the risks associated with driving for all our colleagues and other road users and we provide an effective programme of training, guidance and support to our colleagues in pursuit of this objective.
The use of telematics helps us to use real-time data to track fleet safety on a weekly basis, with our latest average driver safety score nearing 96%. The top line telematics data is shared with our Chief Executive Officer (CEO), ensuring that driver safety and performance is a conversation relevant to the highest levels in our company.
Reducing the risks associated with driving aligns with our aim to ensure that every colleague and contractor working for Northern Powergrid goes home at the end of each shift uninjured and in good health after a productive day’s work.
By John Wilkinson, Driver Safety and Performance Manager
*Commendation based on 2023 data
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