Essential Duty of Care: Private Cars

For smaller organisations, the use of privately owned vehicles for company business is not a new issue. It is fairly common for staff to use their own vehicles for informal or ad-hoc company business e.g. carrying out the daily banking.

What is new is that the HSE have sought to extend a company’s responsibility for the safety of staff to the use of vehicles on the road. As a result, a company has to ensure that, irrespective of its owner, a vehicle is in a roadworthy condition, and is suitable for the job it is being used for.

This means that the company has to ensure that private vehicles used on company business by staff are:

• fully taxed
• fully insured for social and business use
• have a valid MoT test certificate
• have been properly maintained
• have had a pre-journey safety check

For larger companies, problems such as this are relatively new, and have come about largely as a result of drivers opting out of the company car scheme. This creates a major headache for fleet managers when considering health and safety issues.

Any employee driving on business is the responsibility of the employer. The same duty of care applies to the use of a private car as to the use of a company car. So, the fleet manager now has to ensure that any vehicle used for company business is fit for purpose, whether it is a company vehicle or not. Companies need to see regular proof that non-company vehicles are properly insured, regularly maintained and roadworthy.

Because of the difficulties with insurance, some organisations opt to pay the business insurance premium themselves. On the other hand, some companies simply ban the use of private vehicles for company business altogether, while others opt for daily car rental.

Short Term Car Rental
In view of additional responsibilities placed on organisations regarding the use of private vehicles for company business, many organisations are now turning to short term car rental as a viable option, as opposed to allowing the use of private vehicles.

This way, the company can divest itself of the responsibility of ensuring that a vehicle is in a fit condition, as that responsibility rests with the car rental company, who must ensure that their vehicles are fit for purpose.

Visit Arnold Clark Car and Van Rental here.

 

	The Law		Key Points
	Developing Duty of Care		Driver Training
	Car Checks		Speeding
	Private Cars		Mobile Phones
	Risk Assessment		Sources of Information