Driving for Work Is Now a Workplace Risk: What the DfT Road Safety Strategy Means for Your Fleet

For the first time in more than a decade, Britain has national road casualty reduction targets. And for the first time, government has said plainly that driving for work is an occupational safety issue rather than simply a transport one. If your people drive as part of their job, the bar for what counts as managing that risk has just moved.

The numbers behind the strategy

The Department for Transport published the final 2025 casualty figures in July 2026, and they tell a split story. Reported road deaths fell to 1,538, down 4% on 2024 and the lowest figure recorded outside the pandemic years. But the number of people killed or seriously injured rose to 29,918, up 4% on 2024 and 3% above the 2022–2024 baseline average of 28,925. Casualties of all severities were broadly unchanged at 127,883. Child KSI casualties also rose, to 2,432.

That matters because the baseline is now a benchmark rather than a statistic. The Road Safety Strategy published in January 2026 commits to a 65% reduction in killed or seriously injured casualties by 2035, and a 70% reduction in child KSIs, measured against that same 2022–2024 period. The first full dataset published against the new targets shows the trend moving in the wrong direction.

1,538 road deaths · 29,918 killed or seriously injured, up 4% · 127,883 casualties of all severities — Great Britain, 2025 (DfT, final results)

Nearly one in four collisions involves someone at work

Alongside the headline figures, DfT published new analysis of collisions involving people driving for work. It is the most direct statement yet of how much of Britain's road casualty burden sits with employers.

• 23% of all reported road collisions in Great Britain during 2025 involved at least one driver or rider travelling for work.
• Work-related collisions accounted for 29% of all road fatalities — around three in ten deaths on Britain's roads.
• 1,703 people were killed or seriously injured while travelling as part of work, of whom 1,482 were the working driver or rider.
• A further 4,757 people who were not working were killed or seriously injured in collisions involving a working driver or rider — including 1,183 pedestrians.

The DfT is explicit that journey purpose was unknown for 53% of vehicles involved in reported collisions, so the true share of work-related incidents is very likely higher than 23%. In other words, the figure above is a floor, not a ceiling.

This is not an HGV story

Fleet risk conversations gravitate towards heavy goods vehicles, because that is where the established compliance framework already sits — operator licensing, tachographs, DVSA scrutiny. The 2025 data points somewhere else. Cars were the vehicle being driven for work in 28.7% of work-related injury collisions, with vans accounting for a further 22.6%. Between them, more than half.

For anyone running service vans, sales fleets, pool cars or a grey fleet, that is the uncomfortable finding. The HGV operator has a system. The car and van operator frequently has a policy document and an expense claim.

What "managed as an occupational risk" actually means

The strategy did not create new legislation. It hardened the interpretation of legislation that has existed since 1974. Sections 2 and 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act already require employers to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety of employees and of others affected by their undertaking. A vehicle on a public road driven in the course of work is part of that undertaking.

The practical consequence is a shift in what gets examined after a serious collision. The question is no longer only what the driver did in the final three seconds. It is what the operator knew, what systems were in place, and what was done with the information already available. Journey planning, working hours, fatigue management, driver competence, vehicle condition and the organisation's response to previous near misses all become discoverable.

Fleets that hold no data are not in a neutral position. They are in the position of being unable to demonstrate control.

Where telematics turns policy into evidence

Risk management systems fail audit not because the intent was absent but because the evidence was. This is precisely the gap connected fleet management technology closes.

Know who is driving, and when

Vehicle telematics establishes the basic factual record — which vehicle, which driver, which journey, at what time and at what speed. Driver identification and business-versus-private journey classification turn an assumption into a log. For grey fleet and mixed-use vehicles, that record is often the only objective account of exposure that exists.

See the near misses before the collision

Harsh braking, harsh acceleration, cornering forces and speed measured against the posted limit are leading indicators. A driver generating repeated events is telling you something several months before an insurer does. Driver scoring converts that into a trend you can coach against, and a defensible record that you acted on what you saw.

Treat fatigue as a controlled hazard

Fatigue is the risk that policy alone cannot manage, because the affected person is the least able to assess it. AI fatigue detection monitors eye closure, head position and distraction in real time and intervenes in the cab at the moment it matters, then reports the event for review. It moves driver fatigue from an item in a handbook to a measured, managed hazard.

Capture what actually happened

When a collision does occur, footage settles it. Connected AI dashcams and multi-camera systems provide footage-backed first notification of loss, shorten claim cycles, exonerate drivers who did nothing wrong and prevent the reflexive 50/50 settlement — the case we set out in full in AI video telematics and road safety. Given that 1,183 pedestrians were killed or seriously injured by working drivers in 2025, the ability to establish facts quickly is a duty-of-care instrument as much as a financial one.

Design the risk out of the route

Some road risk is best removed before the vehicle moves. Truck-legal routing and commercial navigation keep vehicles off unsuitable roads, cut unnecessary mileage, and reduce exposure to the junctions and structures where incidents cluster. Fewer miles is the only intervention that reduces every category of risk simultaneously.

Hold it all in one place

Evidence that sits in four systems is evidence nobody can produce under pressure. Bringing tracking, camera events, driver scores and compliance reporting into one platform gives a single audit trail — one login, one timeline, one version of events.

A practical checklist for the next twelve months

• Establish your true exposure. Count every vehicle driven on company business, including grey fleet, hire and casual use.
• Confirm you can identify the driver of any vehicle at any point in the last twelve months.
• Set a small number of leading indicators — speed against limit, harsh events per 1,000 miles, fatigue alerts — and baseline them.
• Define an intervention threshold and record every intervention. An unactioned dashboard is worse than no dashboard.
• Bring fatigue into the risk assessment explicitly, with a stated control, not a paragraph of encouragement.
• Make footage-backed FNOL the default process and set a target time from incident to footage.
• Review routing for the vehicle profile actually being driven, not the profile assumed at policy level.
• Agree retention periods for telematics and video data with your DPO, and document the lawful basis.

The pressure is not evenly spread: road transport and logistics fleets already carry most of this framework, while field service fleets running cars and vans typically have the widest gap between duty and evidence.

Sources: Department for Transport — Reported road casualties Great Britain, final results: 2025 (July 2026); Department for Transport — Road Safety Strategy (January 2026); Department for Transport — analysis of collisions involving driving for work, 2025; Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, sections 2 and 3; Fleet News / Business Motoring coverage of DfT work-related collision analysis (July 2026).