How will the new Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007 affect you?

With the new Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007, coming into force from April 6th 2008, companies are being warned that they must take necessary measures to ensure they comply. When travelling and entertaining through the course of business, employees are always at risk, and if it’s found that the injury, or death, is caused because of negligence by the employer they will now be held responsible and the law will take action.

Driving is considered as one of the most dangerous activities undertaken by most employees. According to figures released by The Department for Transport in 2007, whilst the overall number of road accidents decreased from previous years there were still more than 34,000 serious or fatal road casualties. This figure, whilst not reflective of those deaths incurred through business, must still be considered when more than 65% of people on roads during the working week are travelling for business.

How does it affect your business?

If, as a business, you cannot prove that you have taken mandatory measures to provide the safest work environments for your employees and this leads directly or indirectly to a person’s fatality the business could be held liable. You can overcome this liability by taking preventative measures.

Before the new law comes into action the business could only be held liable and convicted of manslaughter if an employee at the very top of company could be proved guilty. Now, the Act can inflict persecution on the whole company if fatalities incur due to gross negligence. With this persecution of the company, it not only exposes the business organisation to significant financial risk but also to its reputation.

Duty of Care encompasses all the actions that should be taken by employers with regard to employees whilst driving on company business, even in their own cars.  
Many organisations check that employees have a valid Driving licence and vehicle insurance but this may not be sufficient for your ‘Duty of Care’

Duty of Care check list:

However, these tasks can prove an enormous administrative burden.

Effective Duty of Care administration

Failure to check licences, or reimbursing expenses payments without an adequate licence check could be interpreted as causing or permitting illegal behaviour.

The most efficient way to manage this is to automate the recording and verification of employee details with expenses. This will ensure that you are making all reasonable endeavours practicable for your employees to be safe on the road.

One of our customers quoted:
“We introduced the duty of care feature to check the vehicle details for all employees driving their own cars on company business and found a third of them did not have sufficient insurance cover”  Brian Woodhouse, Accountant, Business Link Northwest.

expenses includes added Duty of Care functionality that enables you to record, scan & attach and manage:

expenses will also remind you, through simple automated email notifications, when these records need to be checked again, mileage claims can be stopped until the employee has produced the required documentation, ensuring timely response to keeping their details and documentation up to date.

The extensive reporting suite within expenses will also allow line managers to see how many of their team are up to date with their vehicle details and view who will need checking and for which document in the coming weeks/months.

To vastly improve the efficiency of paper based and manual processes further a leading high street bank is using expenses’ sister product framework to manage their Travel & Fleet contracts.

Used by organisations across all industry and market sectors, framework is a user friendly and intuitive, browser-based application that automates the administration of contracts and centralises contract and supplier information into one secure central repository.

Email notifications of contract milestones dates ensure that travel and fleet contracts are effectively reviewed and the repository of contract performance and financial information ensures cost-effective sourcing decisions of vehicle and travel service providers.

For more information on framework click here

If you would like to find out more about this please contact Adele Briggs on 01522 881300 or click here.

 

For further information on expenses:
Download the expenses Brochure
Contact a member of our expenses Team
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