Transport is a lone-working industry that rarely calls itself one. The trunking driver alone at 3am, the courier alone on a rural round, the night-shift shunter alone in the yard, the fitter alone in the workshop on a Saturday - all of them are lone workers in law, and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations put specific duties on their employers.
You must manage the risk to lone workers. Concretely, that means thinking about who will be involved and which hazards could harm those working alone - and then you must:
“Keep in touch and respond” is the operational heart of it. A lone-working policy that is a file on a shelf fails on its own terms: the duty assumes a live channel - the check-in call, the tracking alert that gets answered, the missed ETA that triggers a response rather than a shrug.
HSE names four categories that land directly on this industry:
Certain high-risk work requires at least one other person present, full stop: work in a confined space (where a supervisor and a rescue role may both be needed), work near exposed live electricity conductors, diving operations, work in vehicles carrying explosives, and fumigation. The transport entry on that list - vehicles carrying explosives - is a reminder that some loads change the staffing rule, not just the route plan.
Drivers spend their days at workplaces that are not yours. When a lone worker will be at someone else’s workplace, you must ask that employer about the risks and control measures - the unsafe dock, the aggressive dog, the unlit yard - and make sure your worker is protected there. The duty travels with the driver; it does not stop at your gate.
The same responsibilities - and the same liability for accident or injury - apply to homeworkers as to any other workers: supervision, education, training, and enough control measures to protect them. The planner working from home three days a week is inside the regime.
“Train, supervise and monitor” for a driver raises an obvious modern question: how much monitoring is supervision and how much is surveillance? The duty needs enough visibility to keep the response promise - to know when something has gone wrong and act on it - and most fleets meet it with a mix of scheduled check-ins, telematics alerts, and a clear escalation when a driver goes quiet. What the duty does not require is a control room watching every mile; it requires that when the 3am driver stops answering, somebody notices and somebody does something. The test of a lone-working system is the incident, not the dashboard.
Worth stating too: supervision is not only remote. Briefings before a risky delivery, a supervisor reachable on nights, debriefs after incidents - the unglamorous contact that keeps a lone worker inside the organisation rather than outside it.
Two quiet obligations bookend the working relationship. At the front, medical suitability to work alone is an explicit factor - the role’s demands belong in the conversation before the offer, not after the incident. At the back, every incident, near-miss and failed check-in is review material: the system that failed at 3am needs changing by 9am, not noting for the annual review. Lone-working safety is a living arrangement between an employer and the people it sends out alone.