Have your farming clients tested their brakes ready for Summer?
As an insurance broker, you will naturally want to support your clients in managing their risks effectively.
Like all of our experts, our Agriculture team is keen to support you in providing timely guidance that you can pass on to your clients. Today, we’d like to remind you and your clients of the importance of trailer brake testing.
It is also important to have fully certified evidence that brakes work from an insurance perspective. Your farming clients can gain this from a specialist agricultural trailer test provider.
The consequences of not adequately testing and evidencing effective trailer brakes can be catastrophic, especially if it results in an accident and someone is injured or killed.
In the case of GW Topham, the farm business was fined £400,000 for breaching health and safety rules when a 19-year-old tragically died from multiple injuries when his tractor and trailer hit a bridge on the A1. An investigation by the HSE found that the trailer on the tractor he was driving was fitted with drum-type brakes that had not been correctly adjusted, rendering them ineffective.
The business was charged and found guilty of failing to ensure the health and safety at work of all their employees, failing to maintain road equipment, and not maintaining their trailer to a ‘sufficient standard’ and keep it in good repair.
The HSE determined that the death was preventable if the trailer brakes had been properly checked and tested.
How Merit Inspections can help
Our colleagues at Merit Inspections offer mobile rolling road which is designed for agricultural trailer brakes. They visit clients’ farms to conduct the testing onsite and provide fully certified results and reports to confirm that brakes are efficient and safe.
Your clients can then either file these reports as they usually would, or upload them into the Merit Advantage or Merit AgCheck risk management system, which your clients can benefit from an exclusive Geo discount if purchasing a Geo Agriculture policy. The Merit AgCheck app can also help your clients to keep track of any issues with their vehicles or machinery throughout the year, automatically pinging a notification to their local mechanic if a fault is identified by a member of the team on the system.