The tool is being launched by the Driving for Better Business (DfBB) campaign to aid the work of the Occupational Road Safety Alliance (ORSA) with backing from the Department for Transport and in collaboration with a range of fleet-related organisations.

The free-to-use benchmarking tool will officially launch at the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents’ (RoSPA) Road Safety Conference, which takes place on Wednesday 2 March 2016 at the Holiday Inn, Stratford-upon-Avon.

Adrian Walsh, director of RoadSafe which leads the government-backed DfBB, said: “There is no doubt that by benchmarking, employers can develop sound business cases to identify where to invest to improve road safety.

“Participating organisations will be able to identify areas of concern and draw on the knowledge and expertise of other employers that are excelling in that particular aspect of safe fleet operation, thus helping to drive continuous improvement, innovation and promote a shared responsibility across work-related road safety.

“In developing the online tool, we have heard from numerous organisations that there is little understanding of where to start collecting road safety data, what information to collect and how best to analyse and interpret the information once they have it. This benchmarking solution is designed to assist these processes by proving standardised methods through a secure online platform.”

The new tool is a significant enhancement of Interactive Driving Systems’ Fleet Safety Gap Analysis, an online 10-question solution that allows fleets to benchmark their own responses against those of currently almost 1,400 participants providing an insight into the safety of an organisation’s vehicles and drivers and how they rank against others.

A wide range of organisations have collaborated in the DfBB’s Fleet Safety Benchmarking Project including the Freight Transport Association’s Van Excellence programme, Interactive Driving Systems, RoSPA and the Transport Research Laboratory as well as Fleet Forum, an international interagency association whose focus includes sharing concerns about road safety and fleet efficiency. Support has also come from the Australian National Road Safety Partnership Programme.