6.6 Mobile Workforce, Lone Working & Driving for Work

The Workforce Beyond the Hoarding

Site safety management naturally concentrates on what happens inside the perimeter. But a construction organisation's highest-consequence risks frequently sit outside it: the groundworker driving a tipper between three sites in a day, the maintenance fitter attending an emergency callout alone at 2 am, the surveyor visiting a derelict building unaccompanied, the security guard patrolling a compound overnight. CITB lists mobile workforce and driver safety as its own learning outcome in Module 3 of the SMSTS syllabus, requiring managers to describe the legal framework and guidance supporting the management of health and safety for mobile, lone and out-of-hours workers.

The scale explains the emphasis. Driving for work is one of the most dangerous activities most workers will ever undertake, and it kills more people annually across the UK economy than the entire construction site fatality figure.

Driving for Work: The Legal Position

HSE's position is unambiguous: health and safety law applies to work activities on the road in the same way as it does to all work activities. The duties under HASAWA 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 do not stop at the site gate, and the requirement for a suitable and sufficient risk assessment covers the journey as much as the excavation.

Running alongside it is road traffic law — principally the Road Traffic Act 1988 and the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations — enforced by the police and the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) rather than by HSE. Where a work-related death results from serious management failure, the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 and gross negligence manslaughter are both live possibilities.

Scope — who and what is covered

The grey fleet line is the one most often missed on construction projects, where subcontract trades routinely use their own vehicles. The employer cannot inspect a worker's private car the way it services its own fleet, but it can and must set requirements: valid licence, valid MOT, business-use insurance, and a maintained roadworthy condition.

Safe Driver, Safe Vehicle, Safe Journey

HSE structures work-related road risk into three elements. Assessing all three is what turns a driving policy into a control.

1. The safe driver

• Licence checks at engagement and periodically thereafter, including the correct categories for the vehicle and any trailer — towing entitlements are a common gap on construction plant trailers and tipper-and-plant combinations.
• Competence and training matched to the vehicle: a van loaded with tools handles nothing like a car, and load shift is a real risk.
• Fitness to drive: eyesight, medical conditions, and — connecting directly to Section 4.8 — prescribed and over-the-counter medication carrying drowsiness warnings.
• Fatigue management: journey scheduling that does not require driving after a full shift on site, and recognition that a long drive home after a 12-hour day is itself a foreseeable risk.
• Distraction: an enforced rule that calls are not taken while driving. Handheld phone use is a criminal offence, and a policy of calling supervisors "when they are on the road" undermines it.

2. The safe vehicle

• Servicing and MOT to schedule, with records.
• Daily walkaround checks — tyres, lights, mirrors, screenwash, fluid levels, load restraint — recorded rather than assumed.
• Load security, which on construction is the sharpest issue: unsecured tools, gas bottles, materials and equipment in a van become projectiles in a collision, and anything transported on the public highway must be secured to protect the driver, other road users and those unloading.
• Correct specification: seat belts, appropriate towing capacity and noseweight, beacons and markings where required, and a defect reporting route the driver will actually use.

3. The safe journey

• Route planning that avoids unsuitable roads for the vehicle and load, and accounts for site access constraints.
• Realistic schedules with enough time allowed. Programming three site visits into a day that only allows two is how speeding becomes an organisational decision.
• Rest breaks built into the plan, and drivers' hours rules where the vehicle and operation bring them into scope.
• Weather and darkness planning, with authority for the driver to postpone a journey without penalty. That authority must be explicit; otherwise commercial pressure supplies the answer.

Lone Working

A lone worker is someone who works by themselves without close or direct supervision — including those working away from a fixed base such as delivery drivers, mobile fitters and surveyors, and those working separately from others on a large site or out of hours. Lone working is not illegal, and there is no separate lone working regulation. The duty comes from the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999: you must manage the risk to lone workers, which means assessing whether the work can be done safely by one person and putting arrangements in place if it can.

HSE identifies risks that particularly affect lone workers:

• Violence in the workplace — a real risk for security staff, and for anyone attending an unoccupied site or a domestic property alone
• Stress, mental health and wellbeing, aggravated by isolation
• A person's medical suitability to work alone — an epileptic seizure or cardiac event that would be survivable with colleagues present may not be alone
• The workplace itself, particularly rural, isolated or poor-signal locations

The employer must train, supervise and monitor lone workers, keep in touch with them, and respond to any incident. Where a lone worker will be at someone else's workplace, you must ask that employer about the risks and control measures there.

Work that must never be done alone

HSE identifies categories of high-risk work requiring at least one other person present:

1. Work in a confined space, where a supervisor may need to be present along with someone in a designated rescue role (see Section 3.6)
2. Work near exposed live electricity conductors (see Section 5.3)
3. Diving operations
4. Work in vehicles carrying explosives
5. Fumigation work

This list is worth memorising, because it converts a judgement call into a rule. A request to send one operative into a chamber to take a reading, on the basis that "he will only be a minute", is refused on principle, not on assessment.

Practical arrangements

Out-of-Hours Work

Night shifts, weekend working and callouts remove most of the informal safety net a busy site provides: no first aider on the gate, no second pair of eyes, no supervisor to consult, and emergency services facing a locked compound. Out-of-hours arrangements must therefore be planned explicitly — continuous first aid cover for every shift worked (Section 6.4), lighting, a documented means of emergency access, keyholder contact details lodged with the alarm receiving centre, and a clear rule about what work is not permitted out of hours. In most cases the answer is that hot work, confined space entry, live electrical work and lifting operations are daytime activities with full supervision, and that the out-of-hours scope is limited to activities that can be safely abandoned mid-task.