Reducing Personal and Professional Risk on Owner Driver Jobs
It doesn’t matter how careful you are, working as a courier on owner driver jobs brings risks for the item or items being transported. The fact of the matter is that however much you try to avoid them, bad things sometimes happen to even the most diligent workers.
That unexpected need for an emergency stop, the person who breaks into your vehicle and vandalises its contents just for fun, or that one-in-a-million vehicle fire can cause the items you are carrying to be badly damaged or totally destroyed. Should such a thing happen while you're on the job, you can be fairly sure that your customer is likely to be somewhat less than sympathetic. There’s an excellent chance you’ll lose their business and, perhaps more seriously, you run the risk of being sued for damages.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that you can sell your services on a "goods carried at customer’s risk" basis. Whether you like it or not, the law just doesn’t work like that and you can’t just sign away your liabilities in such a fashion.
Tips to avoid costly accidents
So, if you wish to avoid financial catastrophe following some of the above types of incident, you may find the following tips worth thinking seriously about.
- It might be a very smart idea to have insurance that will cover owner driver jobs – providing not only third party and perhaps professional liability cover but also, most importantly, goods in transit cover.• Do not accept poorly packed packets or parcels for carriage. If they are severely damaged as a result of packing inadequacies, nobody is going to be interested in your lengthy discourses on how poorly they were packed when you collected them. All they will be looking at is whether or not you signed for them and whether or not the damage took place whilst the goods were in your care.
- If you are collecting a parcel that is, in your opinion, borderline in terms of its packing, make sure you sign for it as "inappropriately packed - contents possibly damaged". It won’t absolutely guarantee you immunity from insurance liability but it might help your case should anything be claimed against you after delivery.
- Load your vehicle sensibly. In theory this should be absolutely fundamental to all professional couriers, but sadly real ineptitude is seen at times. Examples include massively heavy parcels being placed on top of small lightweight ones, boxes being balanced precariously on top of the others, and unsecured (guaranteed to be a disaster at the first roundabout) items.
- Don’t leave your vehicle unattended in high-risk locations while loaded. If you are seen to have done so, you may invalidate elements of your insurance.
- Keep your vehicle in tip-top and roadworthy condition. This might be both a legal requirement and, once again, an insurance one. Even if your vehicle is legally roadworthy, if it is poorly maintained and vulnerable to the risks of things such as theft, vandalism or the ingress of water, your insurance provider might refuse to pay up if something goes wrong. Owner driver jobs will be that bit more enjoyable and even lucrative if you think about taking some of the above precautions to maintain your own peace of mind. Norman Dulwich is a correspondent for Courier Exchange, the world's largest neutral trading hub for same day