Duty of care is a phrase almost every travel policy uses and very few define. Applied to ground transport it becomes something quite concrete. An organisation that asks somebody to travel for work has taken on a measure of responsibility for how they get there, and that responsibility does not conveniently pause at the office door or resume only when they arrive at the other end.
What follows describes the general landscape in plain terms and, more usefully, the practical arrangements that discharge it day to day. It is not legal advice. The obligations that apply to your organisation depend on your sector, your workforce and where your people travel, so take your own professional advice before committing anything to policy or contract.
What duty of care means for cars
In broad terms, employers across the United Kingdom are expected to take reasonable steps to protect the health and safety of people working for them, and work-related road journeys are generally understood to sit within that. The practical reading most organisations adopt is that if the journey is being made because of work, the arrangements around it deserve the same thought as any other work activity. Your advisers will tell you how far that stretches in your particular circumstances.
Reasonableness is the operative idea, and it is contextual rather than absolute. Nobody expects a company to control every mile its people travel. What is expected is that foreseeable risks have been considered, that arrangements exist for the ones that matter, and that somebody can describe what those arrangements are. A policy that has thought about a midnight return from a regional site is in a much better position than one that has not.
Knowing where your travellers are
The single most common gap is not knowing that a journey is happening. When travellers arrange their own cars through personal accounts and claim afterwards, the organisation has no record until the expense appears, by which point the journey is over. Whatever else a policy does, it should ensure that work journeys by road are visible somewhere before they take place rather than only in the following month's reconciliation.
Visibility does not require surveillance, and the distinction matters to staff. Knowing that a colleague has a booked car with a named supplier collecting from a stated address at a stated time is enough to act on if they do not arrive. Knowing their live location adds very little and costs a great deal in trust. Keep the record at the level of the booking, and be clear with travellers about what is held and why.
Questions worth asking a supplier
Supplier assurance is where most of the practical work sits, and it is straightforward once you have a standing set of questions. Ask them of every supplier, keep the answers on file, and refresh them periodically. A supplier that answers plainly and in writing is telling you something useful about how it operates; one that answers vaguely is telling you something too.
Do not accept assurances that cannot be evidenced, and be equally wary of claims that sound impressive but mean little. What you are looking for is a clear description of how the supplier organises itself, not a list of badges. The following questions cover most of what an assurance file needs.
- How are chauffeurs vetted, licensed and checked before they carry passengers
- What licensing applies to the vehicles and the drivers for the journeys you book
- How subcontracted or partner-supplied work is vetted and to what standard
- What insurance is in place for passenger-carrying work, evidenced in writing
- How working hours and fatigue are managed on long or overnight assignments
- What happens operationally if a vehicle fails or a chauffeur cannot attend
- Who your named point of contact is, and how they are reached out of hours
- How passenger data is handled, stored and deleted after a journey
Late nights, lone travel and fatigue
The journeys that concentrate risk are predictable: late returns from client events, early collections from home addresses, lone travel by colleagues who would rather not stand on a dark platform, and long drives at the end of a working day. These are precisely the journeys that a cost-led policy discourages, which is why ground transport rules that read only as budget controls tend to create the exposure they were meant to reduce.
Treat the discouragement as the problem to fix. If the policy makes a colleague feel they must justify not driving themselves home after a fourteen-hour day, it is working against you. A short list of situations where a car is simply the expected arrangement removes the negotiation entirely.
- Return journeys after evening events, without a case needing to be made
- Collections before public transport runs, from home rather than a station
- Lone travel by any colleague who would prefer not to travel alone at night
- Long-distance work where the alternative is driving after a full day
- Journeys by colleagues who have disclosed a health or mobility requirement
- Any travel to or from an unfamiliar location where the last leg is uncertain
When something goes wrong
Incidents on road journeys are rare and disorienting when they happen, largely because nobody has decided in advance who does what. Agree the sequence before you need it: who the traveller contacts first, who at the organisation is woken, what the supplier is expected to do, and who speaks to the family if it comes to that. Write it down in a form that somebody unfamiliar with the situation could follow at three in the morning.
Ask suppliers how they escalate, and how quickly. A single named contact reachable out of hours is worth more than an elaborate published procedure that routes through a call centre. Then test it once, informally, by making contact outside working hours and seeing what happens. The result tells you more than any assurance questionnaire.
Recording what you decided and why
Duty of care is discharged through arrangements, but it is demonstrated through records. Keep a short, dated file: the supplier assurance answers, the policy version in force, the risk considerations you worked through, and any decisions where you departed from the norm and the reason. None of this needs to be elaborate, and a lean file that is genuinely current beats an impressive one that has not been opened in three years.
Review the file when something material changes: a new supplier, a new office, a shift in where people travel, or an incident of any kind. Then have your own advisers look at the whole arrangement periodically, because the general description offered here cannot account for your sector's particular obligations or the way your workforce is engaged.
