Grey Fleet: 7 Duties When Staff Drive Their Own Cars for Work
Your organisation has no vehicles, no fleet manager and no transport policy. It also has consultants driving to client sites, auditors visiting premises, brokers attending renewals, loss adjusters going to losses and partners driving between offices, all in their own cars, claiming mileage.
That is a grey fleet, and for most professional and financial firms it is the largest source of serious injury risk in the organisation. Road transport consistently accounts for a substantial share of work-related deaths and serious injuries, and it is the one significant hazard in an office-based business that does not happen in the office.
The instinct is that a personal vehicle is a personal matter. It is not, once the journey is for work.
Seven duties.
1. The duty applies because the driving is work
The foundation, and it settles the ownership question.
The duty under section 2 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 attaches to the employment relationship rather than to premises or equipment, and the obligation to assess risks to employees under regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 does not carve out work carried out on the road.
HSE's guidance on driving and riding safely for work sets out the position, and it is not modified by who owns the vehicle. Road traffic law sits alongside health and safety law rather than instead of it, and the driver's obligations under the former do not discharge yours under the latter.
Commuting is generally outside this. Travel between workplaces, to client sites, and between offices generally is not.
2. You need to know who is actually driving
The first practical step, and most organisations cannot complete it.
Establish who drives for work, how often, and how far. Expenses data is the usual route in, because mileage claims identify the population more reliably than any policy does. Firms that run this exercise are routinely surprised, both by who appears and by the annual distances involved.
Two categories are frequently missed. People whose role is not driving-based but who attend client sites intermittently, which in professional services is most fee earners. And people who claim occasionally enough that nobody thinks of them as drivers, which is where the arrangement is least controlled.
3. Licence, insurance and roadworthiness are checkable, and unchecked
Need Expert H&S Guidance?
Our qualified consultants can help you implement the right health & safety measures for your business.
The three basic verifications, and the second one is where organisations are most exposed.
Licence. Check that it exists, is valid, covers the vehicle category, and carries no relevant restrictions or endorsements. Check periodically rather than on joining, and have a stated position on what a significant endorsement means for driving on business.
Insurance. A standard private policy does not automatically cover business use. Where an employee drives to a client site and claims mileage, that is business use, and if the policy does not cover it the driver is uninsured and the organisation has directed a journey that could not lawfully be made. This is the single most common grey fleet failure and it is resolved by asking to see the certificate and the business use extension.
Roadworthiness. MOT status and tax are verifiable through the government's vehicle checking service, and servicing and tyre condition are matters for a simple declaration. A vehicle you do not own is still the vehicle you asked someone to travel in.
4. Journey planning is a control, and deadlines are the hazard
The organisational side, and it is where professional firms create their own risk.
The realistic exposure is not that someone cannot drive. It is that they drive at the end of a long day, in poor conditions, to reach a client meeting scheduled without regard to travel, and then drive home afterwards.
Practical controls are unremarkable and require somebody to own them. Realistic scheduling that accounts for travel time, a stated position on maximum driving in a day and on driving after long working hours, permission to stay overnight rather than drive back, and an explicit norm that a meeting can be moved. Where a client sets the schedule, the position needs to be your organisation's rather than the client's.
This connects to fatigue and workload, which several jurisdictions treat as regulated psychosocial matters rather than management preferences.
5. Mobile phones and in-vehicle technology
A legal position that tightened and a practical one that has not kept up.
The law on using a mobile phone while driving is strict and covers hand-held use for essentially any purpose. Hands-free is not prohibited in the same way, and it is not therefore safe, and an organisation whose culture expects people to take calls while driving has adopted a control measure that increases risk.
The useful position is explicit: no expectation that anyone answers while driving, no scheduling of calls during known travel time, and no adverse inference from an unanswered call. That is a cultural statement more than a policy, and it needs saying by someone senior for it to be believed.
6. It has to be recorded
The evidential point that applies to every duty in this series.
A grey fleet arrangement that exists as a shared understanding is indistinguishable, after an incident, from no arrangement at all. What is needed is modest: a record of who drives, evidence of the checks, a dated policy, and confirmation that drivers have seen it.
Where incidents occur, they belong in your ordinary incident record alongside everything else, including near misses and damage-only events, because patterns are what identify a problem before it becomes a serious one. Holding this in one register rather than in a spreadsheet somebody maintains privately is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone.
7. Hire cars, car allowances and travelling abroad
Three variations that behave differently and are frequently assumed to be covered by the same arrangement.
Car allowance recipients are grey fleet drivers. The allowance changes the tax treatment and not the duty.
Hire cars shift some responsibility for roadworthiness to the provider and leave the driver, the journey and the scheduling entirely with you.
Driving abroad introduces national rules that differ substantially: on documentation, on permitted hours, on alcohol limits which are lower or zero in many countries, and on what equipment vehicles must carry. A group travel policy written for one country will be wrong in others, which is the same conclusion this series reaches on almost every topic.
The grey fleet checklist
| Item | Question | Common position |
|---|---|---|
| Population | Do you know who drives for work? | No, until expenses are examined |
| Licence | Checked, and rechecked periodically? | Checked at hire, if at all |
| Insurance | Business use confirmed on the certificate? | Assumed |
| Roadworthiness | MOT, tax and condition verified? | Not considered |
| Scheduling | Is travel time built into meeting planning? | Client sets the schedule |
| Phones | Stated position, endorsed at senior level? | Culture expects availability |
| Records | Policy, checks and incidents documented? | Informal |
| Abroad and hire | Treated as distinct arrangements? | Assumed covered |
Rows two and three take an afternoon and remove most of the exposure. Row five takes longer and prevents most of the harm.
For international groups
Driving for work is regulated differently across jurisdictions, and in several the employer's duty is more prescriptive than in Great Britain.
Requirements around documentation, permitted driving hours, medical fitness and vehicle equipment vary, and alcohol limits differ sharply, with some countries operating at or near zero for any driver. Where employees travel between countries, the rules of the country being driven in apply.
The practical approach is a group standard on the things that do transfer, which are the population, the checks, the scheduling discipline and the recording, with local confirmation of what each jurisdiction additionally requires. Periodic health and safety audits are the mechanism for establishing where the standard is insufficient.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite works with organisations whose largest physical risk happens away from their premises, which describes most professional and financial firms once anyone looks at the mileage claims. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with legal, insurance and professional services organisations, where client attendance is the business model and the driving is invisible.
Where people drive in several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction requires, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current.
If your organisation pays mileage and has never assessed driving as a risk, a free gap analysis will tell you how large the population actually is.
Related Articles
Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
