A major brewing company has begunissuing Permits to Drive to more than 1,000 drivers after signing up to Fleet Support’s Group web-enabled RiskMaster programme.

Molson Coors Brewing Company's 900 company car and cash allowance drivers are signing up to the initiative this month alongside 200 other employees who claim business mileage reimbursement.

Meanwhile, the brewer’s remaining 1,300 employees are being surveyed to determine whether they drive on business and, if so, whether they typically take to the wheel of their own car, a company vehicle or a hire vehicle.

Molson Coors undertook a communications programme with all staff informing them about RiskMaster and the reasons behind its adoption.

In addition, the brewer carried out a survey of its employees to identify exactly who was likely to drive on company business in the future.

FSG’s RiskMaster manager Daryl Cottle said: "We always stress to customers the importance of advance communication when introducing RiskMaster and to ensure that they enrol all business drivers on the system.”

Keith Abell, contracts manager at Molson Coors, said: “Occupational road risk management has been high on our agenda for many years.

"We have turned to RiskMaster to make our existing processes even more rigorous.

"We want to ensure that our duty of care towards our at-work drivers is covered across all eventualities.”

The drivers are granted a Permit to Drive following a DVLA licence check.

An online driving ‘test’ is then used to profile drivers as ‘low’, ‘medium’ or ‘high’ risk with the assessment used as the basis for future on-the-road driver training.

Vehicle maintenance records, insurance details, MoT and VED records, and any data on crashes and motoring offences are also fed into the system.

The system creates an individual Driver Operating Life Report from which data is used to continually assess individual drivers in their driving-at-work activity.