Ground Skips Ltd – Going for Gold

Ground Skips Ltd offer a comprehensive range of skips for hire in North London, West London, St Albans and Hertfordshire, including both open and enclosed skips depending on your requirements. With a huge variety of sizes from a small 4 yard Mini Skip for house hold clearances and other small jobs, with 7 yard, 8 yard, 10 yard, 12 yard, 14 yard and 16 yard open skips providing waste clearance to meet your current needs. We have relocated to our new Head Office in Welwyn Garden City, allowing the company to be able to undertake works within the London M25 and Home Counties region. Danielle Middlemass, Transport Manager is our elected Fuel and Emissions Champion and she explains how important FORS is to our Company.

FORS dovetails our business principles and ethics. When we looked at the requirements and benefits of joining the scheme, we saw that they fit perfectly with our ethos of improving safety whilst complementing our drive to improve fuel efficiency and reduce our environmental impact.

We hope to achieve our Gold accreditation and we will ensure we maintain this standard and grow with FORS as the standard continues to develop.

The performance management toolkit really helped us set our targets for reducing our carbon footprint and improving our MPG. FORS has helped us improve our filing systems and procedures.

‘FORS has helped us achieve compliance and safety.’ – Danielle Middlemass – Transport Manager

All our drivers have completed their Safe Urban Driving course. We have also invested heavily in vehicle safety systems cameras, nearside proximity sensors and audible alarms for all our vehicles. All our drivers have also completed FORS E-Learning modules as well.

‘We have increased our MPG by 27% since our baseline year.’ – Danielle Middlemass – Transport Manager

We have managed to keep our Parking fines and accidents/incidents down to zero for the last 3 years in a row. We achieved this by making sure we always selected the best route possible to all our sites and we plan ahead before leaving the yard.

• We get all my drivers to complete a comprehensive Medical Declaration on a annually basis even though the FORS Standard states once every 5 years. It’s also mentioned in the drivers handbook that if they at any point in time start suffering from a medical condition they need to notify the company ASAP as well as if they need to start taking medication prescribed by their GP or over the counter drugs. We will then investigate it to see if it’s still safe for the driver to be driving for the company and we may even ask the driver to get a letter from his doctor informing the company if he is still able to drive for the company. We will then start doing more driver assessments on the driver to make sure he isn’t a risk to the company or anyone on the road.
• We have recently adopted a recruitment policy to try and help us recruit young drivers into the Transport industry.
• We only have 1 Operating centre and we use it for parking our lorries. All our servicing is done by main dealers at their sites not ours. The only noise generated is when my lorries are idling so we can carry out our defect checks. All my lorries have white noise reversing alarms fitted to them.
• We carry waste skips to and from construction sites across the whole country. As we rely on our customers asking us collect or deliver to various construction sites across the whole country, we never know where we are going until they need us. Therefore we can’t afford to try and move anything via barge or train as we collect and deliver the skips to and from building sites and there is no other method than using a lorry and we then asked to deliver anywhere in the country. So using a Lorry is the most cost effective way of moving our clients goods. We are replacing all our lorries with Euro 6 engines as and when they are due for replacement. We have looked at electric vehicles and because of the weights we carry and the fact that our lorries have specialist equipment fitted no manufacture have produced an alternative fuelled vehicle that can carry the weight we do and go over the same terrain we do.

We will continue using what FORS has taught us to improve our MPG and reduce any wasted idling we might have and keep our Parking fines and Charges to zero.

Gaining FORS Gold Accreditation shows how dedicated we are as a company to improving road safety and the safety of all vulnerable road users in London as well as nationally. We will continuously use what FORS has taught us to help reduce our carbon footprint and make the roads so safer for everyone that uses them. We have also managed to make a significant saving by reducing our fuel usage and improving our MPG.