Somewhere in Britain today a driver on hour nine of a shift will be told at a goods-in hatch that the toilets are for staff only. HSE’s position could not be plainer: workers who visit worksites as part of their work must be provided with safe and easy access to welfare facilities - toilets and handwashing facilities - as required by the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992, and that includes drivers carrying out deliveries and collections. Refusing access, or not providing suitable facilities, is against the law. Not discourteous, not poor practice: against the law.
The duty sits on the site, not the driver’s employer. When a driver arrives to deliver or collect, the site must give them safe and easy access to toilets and handwashing facilities. HSE’s guidance goes further than the bare facility: drivers should be provided with a dedicated waiting or rest area where possible, from which they can reach the facilities. The model the guidance describes is a driver who can wait somewhere sensible and use a toilet without negotiating with a forklift route to reach it.
Access has to be genuinely safe, which is where many sites fail even with good intentions. Any walkways between the waiting area or cab parking and the facilities should be clearly marked and signposted, and protected from vehicle incursion. A toilet that technically exists but requires a driver to cut blind across a live yard is not “safe and easy access” - it is a facility the driver cannot safely use, which is the same as not providing it.
The guidance’s most operationally interesting passage is about where the driver waits. If there is no suitable waiting room or area, drivers should wait in their cabs while vehicles are loaded or unloaded - but the site must ensure drivers waiting in cabs still have safe and easy access to welfare facilities. The cab is an acceptable waiting place, never an excuse to withhold the toilet.
Why keep drivers in cabs at all? Because of driveaway incidents - the driver setting off before loading or unloading has finished, with the consequences that follow for anyone on the bay. HSE requires sites to control the driveaway risk with measures equivalent in safety to removing the driver from the cab. So sites face a genuine design tension: get the driver out of the cab for safety during loading, but give them somewhere safe to be - which is exactly the waiting area plus welfare access the regulations demand. The sites that solve it properly - marked walkway, safe waiting room, toilet and handwashing, a controlled driveaway-prevention system - are the ones HSE describes as compliant. The ones that solve it by banning drivers from the building solve nothing; they just convert a safety duty into a legal breach.
For the fleet, this guidance is leverage and briefing material in equal measure. Drivers should know the duty exists and that the law is on their side: a site refusing toilet access to a delivery driver is breaking the Workplace Regulations, and the driver saying so is not being difficult. Equally, drivers should know the deal cuts both ways - where a site provides facilities, use the marked walkways, respect the waiting arrangements, and never treat access as a licence to wander the warehouse.
Operators can also use the guidance commercially. A site with no driver welfare provision is a site with unmanaged vehicle-pedestrian risk, and that is a conversation worth having with a customer before an incident forces it: where do our drivers wait, how do they reach the toilet safely, and what controls the driveaway risk while the bay crew works?
For operators running their own depots - receiving other carriers’ vehicles - the duty lands at home too. HSE’s checklist is short enough to audit in ten minutes: can a visiting driver get to a toilet and handwashing without crossing live traffic routes? Is there somewhere safe to wait? Are walkways marked and protected? And if drivers wait in cabs, are the facilities still reachable - and is the driveaway risk controlled to the same standard as taking the driver off the vehicle?
The regulator has campaigned on driver welfare for years because the same grim stories keep arriving: drivers urinating in bottles in cabs on site after being refused facilities, drivers holding on for hours and damaging their health, drivers - particularly women - leaving routes or the industry over the indignity of it. Welfare is a health issue and, in a driver-short market, a retention issue. The site that treats drivers decently gets served first when capacity tightens; the site that locks the toilet door gets a reputation in every drivers’ group chat within a week.
The law settled the argument in 1992. Every site still arguing has simply not noticed.