Ashtead Plant Hire Co Ltd (A-Plant) Maintaining Gold

A-Plant forms part of FTSE 100 company Ashtead Group plc and is the UK’s leading equipment rental company with over 190 service centres nationwide, more than 3,600 employees and over 35,000 customers in the construction, industrial, infrastructure and events sectors. The company has an extensive range of equipment available to hire, including Plant, Tools, Formwork and Falsework, Survey Equipment, Power Generation, Traffic Management, Site Accommodation, Access Equipment, Pipeline Jointing Equipment, Rail Equipment, Lifting & Materials Handling, Trakway systems, Climate Control and much more.

Shaun Winstanley is the Director of Transport Services and is responsible for the compliance across the UK for A-Plant and all of its divisions, as well as being a FORS Practitioner. As a business we have standardised policies and procedures but FORS has reinforced the requirement to be consistent across the UK to ensure re-accreditation through the auditing process, which has improved year-on-year.

A-Plant became a FORS member in 2009 during the early stages of the scheme, because we recognised that the scheme had the potential to become the recognised standard throughout the UK. Today, we are a Whole Fleet Accredited (WFA) company right across the UK, and we are indeed seeing more and more customers stipulating FORS accreditation in their tender documentation.

We passed our initial Bronze audit first time and have been re-accredited ever since. We later advanced to Silver, and then onto Gold.

As you would expect with a FTSE 100 company we have a comprehensive auditing process across the business, and as such achieving the Bronze requirement was relatively straightforward. Moving to Silver was more challenging, having to complete Safe Urban Driving and E Learning modules with a large number of staff spread among multiple locations right across the UK. As a sign of our commitment to the FORS scheme, we employed a dedicated person to monitor and report on vehicle telematics in September and more recently we have appointed a further member of staff whose main responsibility is to ensure all the training requirements are monitored/booked and updated to ensure compliance to the FORS Standard.

“We continually review our policies and procedures and strive to be the best.” – Mat Smith – General Transport Manager

The benefits of FORS scheme participation have been clearly evident, particularly in the area of driver training to improve awareness of vulnerable road users. As an internal champion of the scheme, Shaun Winstanley has completed the FORS Practitioner course and a further four members of the Transport Services team have also completed the course. Ultimately this gives us a greater number of FORS advocates in the company which will help promote awareness of the requirement and the benefits that compliance brings. For example, FORS has made us focus more in particular areas which ultimately improve the day-to-day running of our transport fleet, like reducing incidents and collisions as well as monitoring fuel consumption via telematics, amongst others.

“Gold Accreditation makes us stand out from the rest.” – Paul Hargrave – Transport Compliance Manager

In the future will be adding new operating centres across the business as well as reviewing alternative fuelled vehicles/ low entry / high visibility vehicles as this will evolve into our purchasing strategy to meet future legislation.

Being Gold Accredited demonstrates our commitment to continuous improvement, safety, the environment and driver training.

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