Awards

Royal award for BT long term work-related motor risk management programme

A Prince Michael International Road Safety Award was recently received by British Telecommunications (BT) in recognition of its industry leadership and on-going 10 year fleet risk management program, which has seen the company slash its collision numbers, rates and costs.

British Telecommunications Award

His Royal Highness, Prince Michael of Kent approved the recommendation of the Judging Panel that British Telecommunications should receive an award in recognition of its exemplary driver management programme. The judges were extremely impressed by BT’s comprehensive, management-led programmes, policies, processes and procedures for people who drive on company business and the extension of the programme to include a wide range of employees and their families.

The award was announced on 15th November 2011 at the BT-hosted European Transport Safety Council’s Preventing Road Accidents and Injuries for the Safety of Employees (PRAISE) conference in front of 150 attendees from a range of European businesses and government agencies.

Dave Wallington, BT’s Group Safety Advisor said: ‘We were delighted to accept this award in recognition of the sustained, long term nature of our programme, which has engaged almost 100,000 people through our online Starting Point driver risk assessment, monitoring and improvement programme supported by a range of targeted organisational, management, driver, vehicle and journey based interventions’.

BT Award

Having identified its motor fleet as its biggest risk of both human and asset harm over 10 years ago, BT initially used a detailed claims and gap analysis to develop a rigorous policy and programme, framed by the Haddon Matrix. Since that time it has led and engaged in a number of industry-shaping research and ‘good practice’ projects to ensure it continues to lead and benchmark well against the latest thinking.

Ed Dubens, President and CEO of Interactive Driving Systems, whose Virtual Risk Manager system and tools has supported BT’s motor fleet risk programme over the past 10 years said: ‘As far as we are aware, BT’s is the biggest and most sustained long term-work related risk management programme in the world, and we are delighted to have helped provide the tools, expertise and resources to have supported it from the beginning. There is no doubt that BT is an industry leader in this area and continues to show the way – by adopting approaches that many other organisations continue to wish to benchmark against’.

Despite its achievements, including halving its motor collisions and cutting its direct costs by approximately 12 million pounds per year, BT is not standing still and for the next 12 months initiatives are in place to focus on extending its risk data-warehouse by adding further government and telemetry based data, as well as rolling out the programme to its increasing number of non-UK based people.

BT is also a Driving for Better Business project champion, a founder member of the Fleet Safety Benchmarking project, a signatory to the European Road Safety Charter, and is engaged in an on-going PhD research project involving Edinburgh Napier and Loughborough Universities which has led to a number of important peer-reviewed research publications.

For details on BT Case Study click here.