Organisations that use heavy vehicle contractors should determine and document their contractor management frameworks and ensure that they are well understood and implemented by operational and functional managers.

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At Unavin, we believe that the best safety outcomes are achieved when responsibility is placed as close as possible to the locus of control. A  properly designed contractor management framework can reduce or eliminate legal risk without compromising safety and compliance outcomes.

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The process of minimising the legal risk, without necessarily adversely impacting the safety outcomes, starts with separation of the responsibilities. You need to distinguish between the business and undertakings of the contractor and the business and undertakings of the consignor (the one engaging the operator of the vehicle).  Make sure that the contractor is competent (has the skills/knowledge/resources) to manage the safety of their business and undertakings.

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Low control, high control or something in between 

Consignors take on different levels of legal risk depending on how much control they have (or should have) over their contractor’s transport tasks. 

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At one end of the spectrum is a low control framework which is often used for less specialised transport services or when using very large transport operators. The Heavy Vehicle National Law (HVNL) makes it clear that it’s the transport operator’s responsibility to manage their own operations and activities so as to ensure safety under the primary and safety duty provisions of the law. Many consignors in these circumstances are comfortable to rely on the transport operators management systems.

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Where the freight tasks become more specialised / dangerous or supply chain critical, consignors often feel the need to take on more and more of the tasks for the transport operators often believing that this will reduce risk for the business. However the consignors may start to inadvertently move to becoming the operator of the vehicles while having no infrastructure in place to manage their obligations. In this case they quite often actually prevent or inhibit the transport operators’ or drivers’ ability to be compliant.

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Telematics can make it more complex 

For a variety of productivity and compliance reasons consignors will provide telematics systems to contractors. Often the contractors will not have access to this system, but when they do the consignor will not have any oversight of the contractor using the system.  As we have seen in recent case studies it is reasonably practicable to use telematics and if telematics are used it is reasonably practical to act on and analyse the data trends to improve safety.

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Unavin’s telematics integrations and ability to control the sharing of information can remove the complexity of providing telematics to contractors. We do this by passing the telematics data to the contractor and assisting them to automate their safety / compliance process whilst giving the consignor the ability to monitor the contractor's performance. This process significantly reduces the administration burden for the consignor and places the responsibility for driver / vehicle management as close as possible to the locus of control enabling the best safety outcomes.

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