In 2018, Euro NCAP analysed the new vehicle market and revealed a huge discrepancy in the safety equipment between cars and vans - even some from the same manufacturer. But what is the reason behind such a difference?

 In this episode, we discuss:

• Why there is a discrepancy between car and van safety features
• What the key active safety features are and how they work
• How the manufacturers have responded to van safety ratings
• What the new van safety ratings mean for fleet operators
• What fleet operators need to know when ordering new vans

Louise founded the Menopause and Hormonal Conditions Network for National Highways. This was a fascinating discussion covering how menopause can impact a woman’s ability to drive for work, the impact on a menopausal woman’s partner who may also drive for work, the need for a corporate menopause policy, sharing corporate best practice across different sectors, and finally, Louise’s award for the valuable work that she’s done to support others.

Welcome to the podcast James.

James: Thanks Simon, it’s lovely to be here.

Simon: James – perhaps you could start by introducing yourself, and explaining a little bit about who you are and what Transformotion does?

James: Sure. Well, I’ve been involved in road transport for over 20 years now, and a lot of my time has been spent working on driver development – in terms of careers, training, and engagement.

For Transformotion, it’s a road transport consultancy and training developer. We work on projects that focus on things like vehicle autonomy, and what it means for the labour market, as well as driver training. In fact, our latest project is called Gaming DRV, championing the cause for distance learning in formal driver training. We’re also developing prototypes for games and gamification in general, particularly where driver CPC is concerned.

In addition to that, we also develop products for fleet managers, to help them manage vehicles and drivers. It’s a fairly unique service – or I like to think it is – where we build our bespoke toolbox talks, audits, that sort of thing. And that’s offered through a website called EasyFleetr.com.

And then finally, we develop immersive driver training. We use eye-tracking technology – which is a bit of a first in our sector. We use 360-degree video and drone footage to create really engaging visuals, which is all wrapped up into a classroom-based training course. And drivers get to use an interactive app where they improve their knowledge and attention, and it also reduces a lot of the tedious admin tasks because we’ve wrapped up things like feedback forms and ID checks within the app.

So, we do a fair bit, and we’ve wrapped that up into three sections.

Simon: Brilliant. This conversation came about because of a chat that you and I had a couple of months ago around driver wellbeing. At Driving for Better Business, we’ve been looking around a range of issues throughout the quarter that fall under the broad heading of ‘fitness to drive’. So, I was wondering what that term means to you?

James: I remember our conversation very well. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head with that – because it is a very broad term. And it’s sometimes quite difficult to pin down, but for me, it’s about being mentally ready to control a vehicle. A lot of the time, if we’ve got cramp, or a headache, or a cold, it’s quite clear. But it’s more difficult to know if we’re suffering from mental fatigue.

Simon: We know there are rules about how much time you can spend driving in any given day because the concentration required can take its toll over time. This issue of mental fatigue, it’s assuming your head is in the game to start with, isn’t it? If the driver’s got personal issues to deal with, what effect does that have?

James: It’s interesting because one thing we discovered with the immersive training is that through the eye-tracking tech, we can actually see how often a driver’s eye is looking in a certain direction. And the sheer volume of eye movements to point A to point B in a given journey is enormous – it’s huge. And a driver doesn’t realise it, because it’s an involuntary movement. But it goes some way to explain why a professional driver feels so exhausted at the end of the day. It’s not just the physical task of driving, it’s also what their brain is doing, and actually where they’re looking.

But in terms of personal issues, it’s very difficult for anyone to avoid thinking about the general rigours of life – I think we all appreciate that. But the result is almost always emotive. Things like anger, resentment, worry – they all come to the fore.

And in terms of what that means for driving – well that tends to lead to things like erratic driving, risk taking, distraction, speeding. All the negative stuff. And obviously those are really detrimental to the safety of the driver and other road users.

Simon: Just give us some examples of what those issues can be. What sort of issues are we talking about that drivers can bring into the cab with them?

James: It’s the ones you might expect. So generally speaking, health issues, money worries, relationships. But more than that, it can be the hum drum. Things like daydreaming about the latest box set, what’s for tea, or the next holiday – things like that. All of those factors create a distraction or brain fog that’s detrimental to driving.

We very often get into a car or van or truck or bus and we just drive – it’s very much an automated thing. We just switch to driver mode – and it’s fair to say that some do. But it’s not a natural given ability. An argument, for example, that happens at home tends to linger once you’re out and about. The issue can fester, and grow in your mind, and take over the rational part of your brain. When that happens, it’s an alarm – it’s a bit of an issue that can’t be reversed. Alternatively, as I said, worrying can cause the brain to become fogged. Which again, leads to late braking or poor judgment.

There are so many different factors, in terms of mental awareness, that have an impact on your driving.

Simon: You mentioned the eye tracker. Did you notice any trends with those eye movements that possibly – I don’t know whether you discussed the results with the drivers afterwards and were able to match up certain levels of distraction, or types of distraction, with the behaviour they were exhibiting and the eye movements. Were there any lessons you took out of that?

James: It’s very interesting because when you do the study on eye tracking and break down the eye movements, you have the benefit of being able to see – through heat maps and single points on a video – where exactly they’ve been looking and how often.

What we don’t really know is why. So, what we’ve done in the past is approach the driver and say “look, we’ve discovered that you’ve been doing this, do you know why it is?”. And more often than not, they don’t know. I’ll give you an example – we had a situation where we filmed a driver joining a motorway. As he was joining the motorway, he looked twice as much to his nearside than his offside. You’d think that doesn’t really make sense, because as you’re joining a motorway, you’d naturally look in your offside – looking for traffic and traffic flow, and where the gap is.

He said, “I don’t really know why I did that”, and we pinned it down to him being so focused on looking at the nearside because of left turns. This was an HGV, he very often drives in London, and his brain has almost tuned in to naturally look at the nearside as a way of protecting cyclists when they’re making left-hand turns. So, what we’ve discovered, is that naturally over time, the brain has been trained, but the awareness just isn’t there – because it becomes an automated response. That was quite interesting.

Simon: I can understand why that would be an automated response – he’s a professional driver and he’s doing it day-in, day-out. But of course, it’s important to remember that we’re not just talking about those drivers who spend all, or most, of the day on the road. There’s many of us – me included – who go out for occasional meetings too.

Presumably, those sorts of drivers are prone to the same sort of distractions – relationships at work that could affect you in the same way as relationships at home, worries about work or deadlines, in the same way as you might worry about health or money at home. Would that be true?

James: Absolutely. I think as an example, if you take a hands-free call, we all know that’s a well-known distraction. But how many of us actually think about the effect of the call, once that call has ended? The conversation may have been heated, for example – something you disagreed with. In which case, when you end that call, your emotions possibly take over your rational driving style. As a result of that discussion, your ability to drive may decrease – which means you increase the risk.

Something that I’ve researched before is called cognitive tunnelling – it sounds very scientific, and it certainly is, but the fundamentals of it are quite straightforward. Why cognitive tunnelling is important is that it often flies under the radar, but it’s the main cause of accidents involving human error. In a nutshell, it’s where the brain focuses on a single task or an issue, and neglects the other factors.

As an example: a driver is travelling on an unfamiliar road – which is often the case. They’re looking for an entrance. They’re so fixated with finding that entrance that things like a cyclist, or a tight bend, or warning alarms, become barely noticed or registered. Of course, what that does, is it means that through cognitive tunnelling, they’ve created risk for all other factors on the road. That’s one to really pin down, because there are so many risks involved there.

Simon: You raised an interesting point about finishing a call, and that still affecting your emotional state. A very good friend at the Driving for Better Business programme is Professor Gemma Briggs, a professor at the Open University who is one of the UK’s foremost experts on mobile phone distraction from driving. I had a discussion with her the other day, and she said your brain can take up to five minutes to disengage from that call because you’re still thinking about the content of that call, mulling over certain things – you’re not back in the game.

It's not a case that you end the call and you’re back concentrating on driving – your head is still out of the game for another five minutes after that.

James: I’m not surprised that that research has come to the fore – it’s a real problem that we sometimes neglect to remember.

Simon: If we look at this from a driver manager’s point of view, an employer’s point of view, approaching these kinds of issues with drivers is probably going to be quite difficult. There could be instances where there are signs that might indicate an issue with a driver – there might be some mental health issues, or they’re distracted by various things. But probably many other drivers who are suffering in silence are able to hide it quite well.

So, where does a driver manager start with this issue?

James: It’s a good question. It’s a tricky one, also, because a lot of managers feel as though they don’t want to intrude or pry into the private lives of any drivers. Sometimes it’s quite difficult to feel as though you’re able to cope with that topic.

But there are things that you can do as a manager. For example, you might want to set up an informal get-together. You could nominate a driver to be a welfare rep. With groups where you’ve got colleagues or peers, that could be very effective.

Of course, not everyone is going to up – and again, that’s fine. But if you allow the drivers the time to actually talk to each other, rather than the usual banter, there’s a chance that they’ll build a different culture within the company, and so it becomes easier to talk about this sort of thing.

It’s important to reassure drivers that there’s no judgment or bias – there’s an inherent suspicion sometimes about these actions, but it’s really important to keep them on side. So, avoid talking about things like disciplinary process, or general process, because that just falls into the trap of being a manager. In this case, you want to take a step back and let them have the freedom to talk. But it’s really important to remember that it’s not about prying into somebody’s life – it’s about offering non-judgmental support, if it’s wanted. If it’s not wanted, then leave it. But it’s important to open that up.

Simon: And part of that conversation needs to be to understand whether there’s anything the company or the work environment is doing that is potentially causing that distraction. I can understand why some drivers wouldn’t want to talk about personal issues going on at home, but if it’s relating to an issue that stems from something at work, then it’s incumbent upon the employer to do their best to find out what that is.

James: Absolutely. I think it’s important to take it on a case-by-case basis. You have to react to the issue, but also provide something that makes an impact. As a manager, you can determine quite quickly whether something is a work-related issue, or if there’s more to it. Often, if it’s a work-related issue, then drivers would generally say, “look, I’m having this issue with a certain task” or, “I want more training on this”. When it’s a private issue, generally speaking, they won’t.

But don’t assume it’s right to ask them what they need – because they might have no idea. As a manager, if you ask a driver what they need on a personal or private issue, it sort of puts the pressure back on them, and very often drivers might close up and not feel free enough to talk about that sort of thing.

That’s why it’s a difficult balancing act – but it is possible. Going back to what I was saying a moment ago about having a peer or colleague group, that can make a real difference. But there are also things like resources that are freely available. So, DfBB’s own CALM Driver Programme, for example. There are plenty of resources there for people – and it’s important to take stock of that, and use what you’ve got out there.

Simon: Once that conversation’s started then – if a driver does open up and admit that they’re struggling – what are the best ways that an employer could support them. Are there any resources available to help employers with that?

James: I suppose, in addition to things like the CALM Driver Programme, there are lots of different resources available. You may want to look at how you deal with internal policies, for example. So, when you’re writing a policy, try to avoid dictating – and instead, explain what the company will do to support the necessary actions. That can have an enormous effect.

If you have shared responsibility within a policy, it makes a huge difference. It tends to stick in the minds of drivers more when they understand what they have to do, but also what the company will commit to do in relation to that process. That can be a big win, because time and time again, companies fall into the trap of writing chapter and verse with safe systems of working, policies, and procedures. It can be detrimental to the end user.

Don’t just hand a pack of documents to drivers just to wade through – very often that’s the case on induction. Instead, look at how you’re communicating. Maybe reduce the number of words you use within policies. Don’t write policies for health and safety managers or insurance companies. Instead, write them on the topics that drivers connect with.

Something else to be aware of – and it goes back to what I was saying about cognitive tunnelling – is something called mental modelling. This is a technique which sounds complex but it’s quite basic. What it means is that you can develop behaviours, improve performance, and enhance safety standards, by adopting mental modelling. There are generally four good examples of that.

Number 1 – on your way to work, envisage the day. Think about what you’ll be doing ahead of time.

Number 2 – during that journey, describe to yourself what you’re seeing, and what it means. Talk out loud about what you’re seeing – that helps to secure or cement hazards in your mind.

Number 3 – find other people to hear your experiences and talk about them. Discuss them.

Number 4 – force yourself to try and anticipate what is going to happen next. You’ve got to be predictive.

Then you’ll notice what goes unmentioned or unnoticed – not just in the car or van or truck, but also in everyday working life. That can act as a warning sign, so that’s quite a useful technique.

Simon: Yes. You mentioned CALM earlier on, and we did some work with CALM a couple of years ago and created what we call the CALM Driver Toolkit, which was a series of resources to go in the vehicle including a leaflet, stickers… basically information to point them in the right direction for helplines or web resources.

Because if there’s a driver in a vehicle, quite often they’re a lone worker, and if they’re not going to put their hand up and offer to talk about it, you’ve got to put the information where they’re going to have access to it when they really need it – which is probably when they’re on their own in the vehicle. I’ll put a link to that in the show notes as well – that was a really good pack, it’s a physical pack that we don’t charge for and can just go in the vehicles to support the drivers.

So, finishing up on that point about creating a good culture, where it becomes easier for drivers to speak up. There are all sorts of things that employers can do, and information that they can put out – we all know that we should eat better, and exercise more, and that can help some of these issues.

What are the key points around creating a culture where we can help minimise some of this, from the employer’s side of things and minimise some of the way these distractions manifest themselves with drivers? At least encouraging them to make some changes might minimise the effects – are there easy ways that employers can do that?

James: Yeah. Factoring in issues from home, there’s a limit on what you can do. But also, in a way, you can provide information that helps them to make their own decisions. If you have a toolbox talk, or training exercise, where you highlight the impact of what happens at home to what happens out on the road, that could be a huge thing.

Very often we focus on driving for work – we don’t focus on just driving, and actually just the commute to work. It’s a real missed opportunity. If you want to get the message across, and you don’t necessarily want to tap into, or pry into, a driver’s life at home, there are things you can do – just to let them know the impact that that has on their working life. Start to make the connection, start to put it all together for them.

When they actually get to work, there are more things that you can do than just having the discussion group, for example. You can tap into plenty of resources. But the fundamentals need to be in place – and the fundamentals are that you don’t have office staff that call drivers unnecessarily. You minimise the number of calls that a driver might have. You encourage drivers to put their phone in the glovebox. These are very well known, but these are quite simple ways of limiting the amount of distraction. Because it’s not just about that conversation that might create emotion – it’s also about the risk of the distraction out on the road.

Fatigue is a big issue – there are things that you can do to look at driver scheduling. Driver routes. How much rest they’re getting – but maybe focus on the quality of rest that they get at home. And again, it’s not just about instructing them on how to sleep – that would be nonsense. But what you can do is explain the value of sleep, and the right mattress and all of that. It’s just recommendations. And all of that can really help a driver to understand the impact and make those connections.

Simon: That’s excellent advice. Before we started recording this, James, you mentioned a toolbox talk that you’ve created to help employers with these issues. Do you want to tell us a little bit more about that?

James: Yes sure. We decided to tackle this head-on. We produced a toolbox talk called ‘From Home to Roam’. It’s a toolbox talk that does exactly that – it makes the connection between home life and a drivers’ ability out on the road. As an exclusive to DfBB, we’re looking to make that free for any podcast listeners – we’re going to put up a code. The toolbox talk will be available on EasyFleetr.com, and hopefully, you can see what we’re trying to achieve.

It's a useful toolbox talk – about 35 minutes – about measures that can make a big difference to a driver’s life.

Simon: Fantastic. I really appreciate you extending that offer to the DfBB community James – thank you for that. I will put links to that in the show notes, along with some of the resources that we’ve mentioned, plus some other resources that we’ve got around fitness to drive, fatigue, and driver wellbeing – some of the issues that we’ve discussed today.

Also, I’ll point people as to how they can connect with you, James, on LinkedIn, Transformotion and EasyFleetr websites as well. If you’d like to get in touch with James, feel free – the links will be in the show notes.

James, thank you very much – really enjoyed that. A very interesting topic to discuss with you.

James: It’s been a real pleasure Simon.

We'll be discussing:

• Why Driver Safety Managers need to understand the hidden epidemic that is diabetes.
• When is diabetes a DVLA notifiable condition?
• The potential consequences of a typical on-the-road diet, enabling conversations with employees around driving with diabetes.
• Good practice for managing diabetes risk, and some resources to help.

Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of Let's Talk Fleet Risk. This quarter we're looking at various aspects of fitness to drive, and my guest today is Kate Walker, who is Managing Director of the Diabetes Safety Organisation.

Welcome to the podcast Kate.

Kate: Thanks for having me today, Simon.

Simon: Kate your website says that diabetes is a hidden epidemic leaving all companies exposed to increased absenteeism, increased risk of accidents, and therefore increased risk of company liability, so, why is that? And why does somebody who manages the safety of people who drive for work need to listen to this podcast?

Kate: I think it’s really important to address this epidemic of diabetes. I think it's hidden in several ways, so I don't think people necessarily living with it understand the complexity of it. And also, I think it's hidden in the workplace.

There's actually one in 12 in the working population living with diabetes and we've just hit 5 million people in the UK. And we can touch on some of the stats in a minute but in terms of your question around why, why is this important for a manager… I think we need to understand that diabetes is a known foreseeable risk in the workplace. And there is legislation that needs to be followed, which again, is often not understood – people think diabetes and they think medical, GPs. And I think there’s a lot of work that needs to be done around bringing this to light and removing the stigma, and also understanding the implications in the workplace.

We know that there are 5 million people with the condition. A further 12.6 million in the UK have pre-diabetes. So, these numbers are significant. And if people are unmanaged, time off of work increases, there is an increased risk of accidents from those who are undiagnosed, or those who are not necessarily managing it as well – we know it’s not always easy to get GP appointments, or the time and support that may be needed for people living with diabetes. And there's also the experience we have when we're going to companies – it's hard for people to come forward and share, because of the unknown. Are they going to lose their job? Is their job still safe? What are the requirements? You know, it’s either let's not get diagnosed and we never have to address it, or let's hide away from it – and that poses a risk in so many different ways. As an employer as well – and I think for any safety managers –there's a real need to understand the difference between the two types of diabetes, which we’ll come on to.

The right conversation needs to be had, also to understand that the Health and Safety at Work Act does come in here, and people, need to make sure they are managing this risk. People living with diabetes have to also comply with DVLA regulations, and they fit under the Equality Act because, more often than not, diabetes would be a disability. So, for all of those reasons, I think we really need to start a conversation around diabetes across the industry to make our roads safer and to help anyone who is living with it to feel safe to come forward, and really be able to share and understand that it's okay and safe to do so.

Simon: Before we started this discussion, I went on the DVLA's website just to see what they had to say about diabetes and notifiable conditions. And it said that if you have diabetes and you manage it with diet, it's not notifiable. But if you do need insulin, it is notifiable.

So am I right in thinking that if you're treating with insulin, it's type one, if you're treating with diet, it's type two. And if so, what's the difference? And I guess, how do you come to have diabetes?

Kate: So no, it's not only type one on insulin. And again, this question alone, I think really raises a good question of how can we have the right conversation in the workplace if we don't understand diabetes and the two variations here?

So, type one people living with diabetes often are frustrated. So, type one diabetes is an autoimmune disease – at some point, their body had a reaction and now their pancreas, which produces insulin, no longer works. And of the 5 million, only 4% - about 400,000 – are living with type one diabetes. Predominantly everybody else is living with type two. In my experience, when we work with people with type one diabetes, they find it frustrating that they are bundled into the same category, and they’re not understood. You’ll often see them now with sensors on their arms, and they have to manage their diabetes throughout the day – so any time they eat, they have to put the right insulin in. They’re effectively self-regulating their own blood sugar levels, which we – myself, as someone not living with diabetes – take for granted; my blood sugars are managed for me. They’re having to deal with it – it’s effectively like another job. Even temperature can cause insulin to do something. As a condition, it’s a lot of work for someone living with it.

On the other side, we've got people living with type 2 – so that's 95 % of the 5 million – and 600 ,000 people with type 2 diabetes are also on insulin. Now, the condition is different. So, for type 2 diabetes, it's often progressive. The easiest analogy – if we use vehicles – is if I was driving down to London from Birmingham in first gear, we wouldn’t be surprised if my car engine was smoking. I hadn’t changed gears. If I turn around, come back, change gears, hopefully I’m in no further trouble. If I keep driving at first, at some point the engine will smoke and it will breakdown.

The pancreas, from the perspective of living with type two diabetes is very similar. So, if we look after our body, it will work effectively. Over time, if we keep driving in first or pushing too much in – and that could be stress, it could be other medical conditions, it could be the choices of foods, lifestyle… there's many factors that contribute to type two. But if it all pushes on that organ too often, at some point we get the smoke, the warning signs of diabetes, pre-diabetes. And if we ignore that, it turns into type two diabetes.

Sadly, it’s a progressive disease – caught early it can be managed on food and lifestyle choices. But left, or not well-managed, it can need medication from different strengths of tablets – some of them strong, and reportable to the DVLA – right up to insulin. So, people living with type two diabetes who are on insulin, they don’t become type one – they are type two on insulin. As I said, there are 600,000 in the UK.

So, when we look at insulin, often people with type one diabetes have had it since they were young, and they get a lot of support. Often people with type two diabetes on insulin are not as well educated because there’s not as much support for them. So, I think it’s another place, in the workplace, to help educate and support people living with both types of diabetes on insulin. And under DVLA regulations, they have to test every 2 hours whilst driving on insulin to ensure the blood levels are correct – safely – for the prevention of any accidents happening due to their blood sugar levels dropping too quickly and having a hype.

So, if we can have managers and people inside companies understanding the difference, understanding the requirements of people, and the differences that they're living with, it really allows it to become safer – and there are no blanket bans in the UK. So again, anyone can drive as long as their blood sugars are well managed and they're looking after themselves.

Simon: Well, what would be typical symptoms of someone who is pre-diabetic?

Kate: Classic symptoms of pre-diabetes is over-thirsty. Changing sexual excitement. Going to the toilet regularly. Getting too hot. The difficulty – which is why we say that it’s hidden – is they’re very subtle symptoms. Over-fatigued, can feel more stressed than normal… they’re all symptoms we could put down to a busy day, or work, or drinking too much. Diabetes UK have a Know Your Risk Score – you can do some questions and check it out and I absolutely recommend it. The sooner we catch the pre-diabetes, or the edge of diabetes, it’s reversable for many – not all – and actually, it prevents the complications and the damage that occurs, which are really the major problems that come with diabetes down the line. So, there are some good solutions to it but caught early it can make a massive difference.

Simon: You said previously that diet was one of the possible contributory factors, and a lot of the drivers that are managed by the audience on the call today… a lot of those drivers are on the road all day and they rely on cafes petrol stations, motorway service stations, etcetera for their daily nutrition, which obviously isn't great. What are the likely consequences of that?

Kate: Yeah, I think this is an industry that is faced with some additional challenges. We've got to look at what impacts diabetes. Stress does, as we've said, nutrition does, movement does. So, can we move a little bit more? Well, that's let’s have a little walk around whilst we're in those cafes and petrol stations just a little bit longer.

The food choices are interesting. We all know what it's like to stop at a cafe, but are there better choices? I think we live in a really interesting time where we're seeing huge amounts of sugar in things, or chemical sugars, and processed foods. My question always is, could they take something? Maybe, maybe not. If we do go to a café or petrol station, what is the better option? Not the best, necessarily, but what would be better? Is there a cottage pie and vegetables, over a burger and chips – because there’s less starch, more nourishment. That would make a difference. I think we’ve forgotten that a small amount over time will make a difference. And I think it’s about going in and making a better, informed choice – instead of the big grab bags, can we just have a normal bag of crisps. If that’s 5 days a week, by the end of the year, it’s a significantly smaller amount of food eaten. That could be the catalyst to be enough not to go into diabetes.

Simon: Absolutely, it's so easy to go for those bigger portions because they're very good at marketing it, aren't they?

--------------

The Driving for Better Business Van Driver Toolkit contains guidance on combating a range of other fit-to-drive challenges, including fatigue and driver impairment. There's a range of fact sheets and pre-recorded toolbox talks that are all free to access. The web address is in the show notes.

--------------

Simon: Your website says that 1 million people don't know they have the condition. So, how do you start a discussion around diabetes? Because I imagine there's some stigma felt by people who have diabetes about discussing it. And how do we create a culture where that stigma is minimized, and it allows that discussion to take place?

Kate: Yeah absolutely, and it's a big part of the work we do. I think it's frightening to think there's 1 million people that are undiagnosed, and for me, before we kind of get on how do we do this, and stigma, why it concerns me is that the longer we leave diabetes unmanaged our blood sugars get higher. So, if we imagined a glass of sugary water and dropped a dull coin in over time it would shine the coin. Sadly, as we are not robots, internally, what actually happens is it starts to rot us inside. So that’s why we get damage to the nerves in the feet – people can end up with lack of sensation in their feet which, in this industry, is a scary concept.

It damages eyes – diabetes is the leading cause of blindness in the working population. And also, nerves, particularly for men around your manhood and erectile disfunction. 75% of men who have diabetes get erectile disfunction at some point.

So, when we understand the risks, it starts to beg the question – how do we help people to think it’s safe to go and get tested. And this industry is very challenging because we have to recognise as a driver – if they're the key breadwinner at home and they are nervous they may lose a job, that's quite a frightening concept. It's easier to bury their head and ignore it, and we know that's often done.

So how do we start this, as you say, this conversation? And I do think there's a part where employers can start to say, look, here's a sign of symptoms, how do we start sharing this with you – we're not trying to remove from the company. Actually, we're trying to help you stay well and safer and keep you in employment for longer.

Because the complications from diabetes are what cause people to have to quit their jobs – we have 190 amputations a week in the UK from diabetes from the toe upwards. So, if we can capture this early, we can give good quality information and make people realise it is safe to come forward and share, there is no stigma… and it’s not always because of what you’ve eaten, it’s not always poor choices. There could be 1001 reasons why your body is not able to produce, or do enough work with, insulin. If we can get this message across well, and that small changes will make a difference and you don’t have to stop everything – we could at least have a sensible conversation, like the one that we've seen with mental health, people do want to come forward, people do want to share, but we need to provide that space for that conversation to take place where it's not a blame and it's not I'm not good enough, it's actually hey, we all don't pick the best foods. My daughter loves Haribo’s, it's my weak spot, they're often in the house, you know, one for her, two for me when I make packed lunches. None of us are innocent in this, we all know this world, so how do we start to provide that opening and say let's talk together and how do we start to make a small change, so people feel safe to come forward.

Simon: If we manage to have that discussion and a member of staff feels able to come forward and admit that they're diabetic, how would you expect an employer to deal with that member of staff? What would be good practice for managing that diabetes risk?

Kate: Yeah, great question. I think firstly, from a management perspective, it's great if they had the education around the different types of diabetes – and have a general understanding themselves, so that conversation can be well-managed and the person living with diabetes can feel heard and supported, and they’re not having to do all the education for the manager.

When we work with people living with diabetes, we hear all the time, oh, I have to tell them everything, they didn’t know anything. So, the starting place for a manager is that there is some understanding of diabetes – both type one and type two, so they can provide a safe place and an effective place. Then, it’s about asking the individual what they need – because everyone’s diabetes is different, even within type one and type two, there’s differences within that, what medicines they use, are they on medicines, what do they need… so a real open conversation to find out what that individual needs is a great starting point.

And then, if they need to take time to take blood tests, if they need somewhere to keep their insulin cool, particularly in the summer, these are all important things. Have they got somewhere on-site or with them that they’ve got their sugar and glucose shots, in case they have a hypo. Do other people need to know around them, are they happy for that to happen. These small things will make a significant difference. Do first aiders around know how to deal with diabetes and hypos? I think with all stuff, is the right risk assessment policy in place to ensure everyone understands this in the workplace to make it safe.

They’re quite small adjustments, paperwork and the background, and then small adjustments – and also ensuring they can get to medical appointments to keep them healthy and well and to keep them in work.

Simon: Can you just explain a little bit about what a hypo is, what that looks like?

Kate: Absolutely. So, a hypo is when blood sugar levels go too low. So, for us all our blood sugars vary up and down throughout the day as we need to do things. When somebody is living with diabetes, it is more often than not the medicine – specifically insulin and one of the others that is quite strong – that pull blood sugars back down to keep everything nice and safe, and keep our bloods in the nice range.

If the right food hasn’t gone in, or there’s a different stress – a lot of other factors could contribute – but something happens and the blood sugar goes below 4, generally, people will present with what is known as low blood sugar – a hypo, or hypo-glycaemic episode. And they can present very differently. Somebody might act as if drunk, they might pass out, they can go quiet and slump in a corner, they might start being unclear with their speaking, over-sweating. And their bloods are going dangerously low. And at that point, they need to be given sugar. Not in the form of chocolate as it has too much fat, but like a glucose shot, a liquid shot, to get their sugars back up and to stabilise them there.

That’s why we believe it’s really important that people around do understand if somebody has diabetes – if they’re willing to have that information shared – so they can be supported and helped. And if left untreated, it can be very serious and even go into a coma, and worse potentially.

Simon: Are there any common failings, around how employers manage diabetes, and how would that affect them from a duty of care perspective to those employees?

Kate: I think the largest thing that we see as we go into companies and work with organisations is we see very little understanding of diabetes. So, almost the first failing is that it's not recognised to have any impact in the workplace. It is seen as just purely medical, it's s medical condition. Organisations often have, if they're big, occupational health. If someone has chosen to come forward, then they may well be under occupational health and have what we've talked about already in place.

The challenge is that we know 1 in 12 in the workforce have diabetes, and we know most organisations haven’t got that sort of number on their books. So, the biggest failing is understanding that they’re in the workplace and providing a culture or environment where they are free to come forward and share that safely. I think it’s the biggest failing. If we’re unfortunate enough for an event to happen where something serious or fatal happens, someone having a diabetic hypo, post-event, they will be asked what have you done that is reasonable and practicable to ensure that everything was safe? And if they said it was due to diabetes, what have you got in place? Very few organisations currently would be able to say we provide this education, the opportunity for them to come forward, we give this space. Many would say, well, they didn’t tell us.

There’s a grey area in this part, because under the Equality Act, diabetes is more often than not a disability. There is definitely a grey area, but it would be still questioned – what had you done to give them the opportunity to come forward and speak about this? So, I think one of the biggest failings is just a lack of recognizing that diabetes is a known and foreseeable risk, and putting in place awareness and education in the workplace so people can come forward. And then just ensuring that they’ve got the policies and risk assessments that would then follow on from that.

Simon: The obvious question after that is what resources are available that can help employers understand the issue? And are there any things that they can share with their drivers as well?

Kate: Absolutely. I mean, there's some great resources out there. Diabetes UK have a risk assessment and lots of information. We have a charity arm called Cuppa Squad – it's free to access for anyone living with diabetes to join support groups because it's not always easy to live with diabetes.

From an employer's point of view, there is less available. From ourselves, we provide a lot of work around awareness and education. And then it’s simple stuff, like campaigns that can be done to bring awareness about symptoms, about health choices… there are resources available. There aren’t as many directed purely at the workplace, around the legal side, but we can help with that. And I know the work you do around policies and risk assessments will all come together and work as a collective for an employer.

And one of the things we spoke about earlier was the One Less campaign, which we provide for free for any organisation, around if you had just one less spoonful of sugar in a coffee, or tea, or hot chocolate – one less, six cups a day, it’s a whole kilogram bag less of sugar a month, and by the end of the year that’s 12 bags of sugar. If you’re pre-diabetic and took out 12kg of sugar, that could be the saving grace. And suddenly, over a couple of weeks, you get used to not having it. So, we have a whole campaign that can be put into place, and these small changes will really make a difference – so it’s free if anyone does want these resources.

And it’s about opening up those conversations in companies, bringing it to light and then providing simple steps for those who choose to take them.

Simon: I think that's fantastic. Thank you very much, Kate. I was staggered at the number of people who had diabetes, I had no idea the issue was that big. So, thank you very much for sharing your knowledge on what I find is a fascinating subject and I think all of our audience will think that as well.

We've got all the resources that we've spoken about, I'll put links in the show notes so people who want to make contact with you and Diabetes Safety Organisation can find out where to contact you, and also that campaign you just spoke about the One Less campaign and Diabetes UK, I'll put links to all of those in the show notes. So, Kate, thank you so much for your time, it was a fascinating discussion.

Kate: Thank you and thank you for asking me on.

In this episode I’m talking to Nick Reed, Founder of Reed Mobility and Chief Road Safety Adviser to National Highways about the active vehicle safety technologies known as Advanced Driver Assistance Systems. We’ll be discussing:

• How the latest driver assistance technology is keeping drivers safer
• Why fleet managers need to pay attention to vehicle safety ratings
• How telematics systems fit in to the vehicle safety technology suite
• Whether drivers could struggle with any of this technology
• The issue of maintaining driver concentration when these systems are doing some of the driving
• And finally, a quick look at where we are now with fully self-driving vehicles.

In the previous episode we looked at: · The number of tyre-related incidents and their consequences. · The results of this year’s survey looking at the legality of tyres at the point of replacement · The specific tyre safety issues businesses need to look at for each vehicle type including trucks and vans.

In this episode we continue that, looking at company cars and grey fleet, including the emerging concern regarding tyre safety on electric vehicles, and the safety implications of grey fleet drivers opting for part-worn second-hand replacement tyres to save money. We also discuss the key messages and resources that are part of this October’s Tyre Safety Month campaign.

Welcome to let’s talk fleet risk – a podcast for those who manage drivers andvehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation. I’m Simon Turner, Campaign Manager for Driving for Better Business, and in this episode I’m talking to Stuart Lovatt, Chair of the road safety charity, TyreSafe. In a wide-ranging chat, we discussed:

The number of tyre-related incidents and their consequences. The results of this year’s survey looking at the legality of tyres at the point of replacement The specific tyre safety issues businesses need to look for each vehicle type including trucks, vans, company cars and grey fleets. We talk about specific emerging issues around tyre safety for electric vehicles. The impact of poor tyre-management on the bottom line This year’s Tyre Safety Month campaign and free resources you can share with your drivers.

Welcome to Let's Talk Fleet Risk – a podcast for those who manage drivers and vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation. In this episode, I'm talking to Alison Moriarty about leadership and road risk management.

We’ll be discussing the difference between leading and managing; how to get buy in from senior leaders; the impact leadership has on safety culture; the importance of managing reputational risk; and how all of this can impact the organisation’s financial performance.

Simon: Hello and welcome to this edition of Let's Talk Fleet Risk, a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.

Welcome to Let's Talk Fleet Risk. My guest for this episode of the podcast is Geraint Davis, who is the new concession director for FORS, the UK's leading fleet accreditation scheme. Established 15 years ago, it now boasts almost 5000 accredited operators who, together, operate over 90,000 vehicles.

Welcome to the podcast Geraint. So perhaps you could start by just telling us a little bit about what your role involves and what you're looking to achieve with FORS?

Geraint: It’s great to have the opportunity to join you today. Driving for Better Business is an initiative we at FORS fully support, and in my role as Concession Director I’m really looking forward to strengthening our ties with you. So, what does my role involve? Well, I will be leading the FORS team through the day to day of running the scheme, helping to develop a standard, and liaising with key stakeholders via the trade associations Logistics UK, RHA, and others; local authorities, politicians or the enforcement bodies. The DVSA, the Office of the Traffic Commissioner and such like along the way. I'm personally very passionate about FORS and the difference it brings for specifiers, our operators and as well the wider community.

So really, I'm looking forward to developing FORS as a leading quality assurance scheme, improving the value for our accredited operators and specifiers and also growing into new sectors where we can. In my previous roles at the coalface of the road freight sector. I have taken a business through FORS accreditation, I've worked through audits – I’ve been a FORS auditor and personally delivered FORS training. I know the benefits FORS can bring to an organisation when it comes to improving safety and efficiency, and essentially – and crucially – winning more business.

Simon: That’s a really broad role, and you alluded to some of the experience you've got over the last few years which we’ll come onto as we go through the podcast, because some of those I think are really interesting and relevant.

So, you've only been with FORS for a few weeks. You mentioned about your previous role as a FORS accredited operator – so you were Chief Operating Officer for John Raymond Transport, and while you were there you led the risk management strategy for over 22 years, wasn't it? So, I just wanted to sort of ask you what were the biggest challenges you faced when you when you started managing driver and fleet risk?

Geraint: Where do you start? John Raymond Transport has over 100 trucks and 200 trailers and multiple depots - over 150 employees. As COO my key responsibility is to make it work every day while delivering value for our customers and profitability.

While doing all this we also had to make sure we were operating to the highest standards of roadworthiness and complaints across all aspects of transport, business, and of course employment legislation – that's nothing new. These are challenges that every fleet operator faces every day, and you need systems and processes in place to give you and your team the confidence that it is a well-run business. That's easier said than done of course, and to be successful requires teamwork, and everybody pulling in the same direction with a set of common goals; one vision, if you will.

Communication is key, it’s the most important thing in my leadership toolbox. I've always been good at talking – that's what everybody says! And it’s developing the right framework and support, and also training. At John Raymond Transport, I delivered the driver CPC training myself. There won’t be many COO’s that do that, but it kept me close to the business, and gave me direct communication channels to the drivers – that pays dividends when you try to develop a winning culture in an organisation and take everybody on the journey with you.

Simon: Yes, it certainly does. 22 years you were there – that’s a very long time to be managing risk for one operator, so I was wondering what changes you saw over that time – in how you manage risk, and how the challenges evolved.

Geraint: Well, one of the most exciting things about the fleet sector is the constant state of change – be it technical improvements, legislation, or external impacts. During my time at John Raymond Transport, I worked through the stock market crash, the banking crisis, the credit crunch, and of course the pandemic – and now the cost of living crisis, and everything that that brings. All of these things brought about a massive change to the sector.

On a technical front, vehicle development has been dramatic. When I first started out, we had paper tachograph discs. I remember driving a Seddon Atkinson 401, and now we've got the Volvo I-Shift shift, and automated manual gearboxes, all sorts of things. Improving safety for vulnerable road users – that's been huge. We’ve seen big improvements in greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles. And we witnessed digitisation in the sector – whether it be digital tachographs, telematics, tracking. There’s a tremendous number of things available to operators, which at best were patchy when I first joined industry.

Data is the new oil. It needs to be refined in order to be used and be useful. The underlying lesson is you need to be flexible and adaptable to survive. As an operator in the sector, you need the tools and support to help you navigate your way through these changes. This is one of the key reasons why I recommended the FORS accreditation at John Raymond Transport 15 years ago. FORS has been right beside me, and we've evolved as a business, and as the industry has changed so has FORS. When I look forward to at the changes still to come, the biggest impact will come from decarbonisation of commercial vehicles. It’s on the horizon now. This is going to transform how fleets operate and I'm excited about how the next developments in batteries, electric or hydrogen vehicles, or alternative fuels, and how we’re going to adapt and bring them into fleets.

Simon: So, you mentioned that you brought FORS into John Raymond Transport 15 years ago. Now, we’re looking currently at leadership and business benefits as part of our campaign messaging. And presumably the FORS framework helped improve the way you were managing, and that's what led to some of the business benefits you saw. We recently published a case study that you helped us put together for John Raymond Transport which showed up reduction in incidents of over 23% year on year. But not only that – it showed a reduction in driver penalties by about 1/3, as well as improvements in fuel use and CO2 emissions. That's clearly very important to you as it demonstrates the value of the work that you've done – but I was wondering how those kinds of results were valued by the rest of the board. Did you have the support from the rest of the management team to do what you needed to do, and did they value what came out of it?

Geraint: Absolutely – from the board and the wider group. For an organisation to be successful you’ve got to get everybody on board, from the boardroom to the drivers rest area, and of course the technicians and everybody involved in the business. Vehicle safety and compliance can’t sit in a back corner outside the main performance indicators of the business, and I was always very appreciative that John’ Raymond Transport recognised that.

Ensuring you have a well-run business is obviously crucial to the financial performance of the organisation, which is a key consideration for the board. Improvements you mentioned around reduction in incidents and driver penalties are also important indicators for the underlying health of the business. And of course, they make a direct correlation with the bottom line.

Simon: You recently left John Raymond Transport and you've now taken up the role of Concession Director, which is a role with Sopra Steria, who now run the FORS programme. Sopra Steria only took over FORS at the beginning of last year, 2022, so perhaps tell us a little bit about what's happened with FORS since Sopra Steria took over, and how your role is going to fit into that. What are your objectives and aspirations for the FORS programme going forward?

Geraint: Well, it's a really great honour for me to take up this role. I know how important FORS can be for a business, as I’ve seen it from the other side, of course. Sopra Steria took over the administration of the scheme in January last year and it's been an exciting year of transition – keeping the service firing on all cylinders, while putting up the building blocks in place for future growth and development. We've trained over 4600 managers, seen over 130,000 e-learning courses taken, and we’ve funded over 1600 driver training courses, and delivered 265 practitioner courses - I think those are some great numbers and it's definitely something to build on.

And just a word on FORS practitioners – I’m one of them – they're a very important part of the FORS family. These people have a deep knowledge and understanding of the benefits of FORS, at a level equivalent to a master’s graduate. We’ll be looking to work even closer with our practitioners in future, and that's a key goal of mine.

Simon: Your past experience that we spoke about earlier - Chief Operating Officer and Transport Manager – you've also been Chair of Logistics UK's Road Freight Council. You've been a director of the RHA – that's obviously a great help. You've also been a FORS auditor and a Driver Trainer. This must be a fairly unique breadth of experience – so what kind of insight does all of that experience give you as you look to develop FORS and engage with fleet managers?

Geraint: What operators want… what operators need… I always think about that Mel Gibson film, What Women Want, where Mel Gibson has a terrible accident, gets electrocuted and can suddenly read the minds of women.

Well, I like to think we can get into the minds of operators, and we know what operators want now, and we’re much more aligned with that. My previous role at an operational level with John Raymond Transport, as a member and chair of the Logistics UK Road Freight Council, UK Road Freight Council at Westminster, and more recently, Director of the Road Haulage Association will certainly be a benefit as we move towards the future.

Simon: It was a very good film, and I think that is a good analogy for the sort of benefits that you can bring to FORS, so that’s really good. Now, there's obviously a number of audited accreditation schemes out there for fleet operators. FORS is probably the most well-known of those. Just being a bit agnostic about schemes for now, why should fleet operators consider registering with an accreditation scheme? What does it bring to the fleet operator?

Geraint: Well, for me, FORS has always been the benchmark for the fleet and transport sector, and this remains the case really. I certainly don't think there's an equivalent scheme offering anywhere near the breadth of the offering that FORS does at a holistic level. We’ve got nearly 5000 accredited operators as a testament to that. I think the vast majority of people in transport want to be known for running a good tight ship, and I think people want to work for those types of businesses.

On top of that, of course, customers want to work with transport suppliers they can trust. A trusted supply chain: that’s what FORS accreditation offers. I think of it as the equivalent of a Michelin star. The scores on the doors on the restaurant. It tells other people something about you that sets you apart. You’re a reputable business. You care about the people you employ and take the necessary precautions to look after other road users. It also says you're happy to have your systems and processes measured by a third-party auditor. It’s a mark of quality.

Simon: And these schemes typically go much further than the legislation or HSE guidance goes, as far as compliance for fleet operators. And I know FORS certainly goes a lot further than that – why is it so important to go further than what’s legally required?

Geraint: Right. I say that minimum standards get you a ticket to join the race. But if you really want to excel and demonstrate your capabilities to your clients, your competitors, and future employees then you need some means of differentiating yourself, which is where FORS delivers. It sets you apart from industry peers.

On another level, all of us involved in the industry have to strive to improve standards every day, and the FORS audit is one of the few measures where operators can demonstrate they're pushing the boundaries of safety, efficiency, and business performance.

Simon: Okay, so last question now. If a fleet passes their audit – and obviously many of your accredited fleets have done, you've got thousands who passed their audit – they've effectively been shown to meet the standard. But I'm wondering whether that's like a vehicle passing its MOT. Because, you know, the audit is a snapshot of the position on one day. So how does an accredited standard like FORS ensure compliance throughout the year, and what do you expect of your registered fleets to ensure that those high standards are continuously monitored and met?

Geraint: I think it's important that we see FORS as an accreditation… well, we see it as a process, or a business concept, rather than just a moment in time. It is a process. A culture. In passing the audit and gaining accreditation, a fleet operator has – in the first place – voluntarily put themselves forward for review. They said “yes, I think I meet the necessary standard in the way I run my fleet”. And then during the audit, they back that up with a demonstration that they have the systems, the processes, the data reporting in place to operate at the highest level, particularly if you achieve FORS Gold.

As I said legislative compliance is a minimum standard, and of course operators have to demonstrate that when they present the vehicles for MOT, annual test, or they’re stopped at the side of the road; a DVSA encounter, or it could be police CBU for a check. But have quality assurance processes in place within a FORS accredited operators’ business, and should – and I’ve emphasised should – ensure that these issues are picked up in the normal course of fleet operation.

Simon: Excellent answer – I think you're absolutely right. It's all about improving and strengthening culture because that's how you embed the improvement.

So, Geraint, thank you very much for sharing your insights with us today. I appreciate you sharing the case study as well that we put together on John Raymond Transport, and I will put a link to that in the show notes, and I wish you well for your new role in FORS. Geraint, thanks again for your time today.

_________________________

If you many drivers and their vehicles and you face similar issues to those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful resources on the Driving for Better Business website – and these are all free to access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don't forget to hit subscribe so you know when the next episode is released. And please also give us a 5-star review - this helps us to get up the podcast rankings and makes it more visible to others who might also find it useful. You can follow us – that's Driving for Better Business on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And most importantly please help us to spread the word – all our resources are free for those who manage fleets, and their employees who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let's Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode.

Brought to you by Driving for Better Business.

Speedy Asset Services is the most recent good management case study that we’ve published on the Driving for Better Business website and I’m going to talk to Gareth about some of that in more detail.

Welcome to the Podcast Gareth.

Simon: Gareth – you’ve been with Speedy a long time so could you start with a summary of how you came to be involved in driver safety and fleet compliance, and what your role entails at Speedy?

Gareth: Thank you Simon. My journey into transport and fleet and driver training started many moons ago when I was employed with HM Armed Forces. From there, I spent a lot of time at DHL International in the driver training department. I first came to Speedy in 2007, as the Driver Trainer, and stayed there for just short of 7 years – covering all aspects of driver training, driver behaviour training, CPC which had just come in, accident management training, and various other training courses.

I then left the business for just over 18 months, and then came back to the business as the Group Fleet Compliance Manager, where my role then involved the HGV and van compliance, road risk management, and also duties around driver behaviours, and also dangerous goods safety advisor.

Simon: So, it’s obviously a very complex role - you’re running over 1,000 vehicles at Speedy but they’re not all just simple vans. You’ve got a lot of specialist vehicles, and open back vehicles where safe loading is critical. What are the key safety and compliance challenges you face in your day to day operations?

Gareth: The key challenges are that we must make sure that everybody who uses the road is always safe – that includes our drivers, but also all of the vulnerable road users at the same time. We all have a duty of care to make sure that everybody is safe at all times. So we ensure that our drivers go through a load security training programme for various types of vehicles.

So, we have a load security training programme for our tanker drivers. Some people wouldn’t class that as a load, but it is a load – it’s liquid. We have a load security course called The Light Side, for our transit drivers, and we have a heavy load security course for our heavy side drivers. We also have a load security course for our powered access side of the division which is run through the International Powered Access Federation. And all of that is captured on our internal training portal, so people can log in and see the progress, which has expiry dates and completion dates etcetera.

Simon: Safe and secure loading I think is one of the main challenges on the roads for most fleets – a lot of vehicles that get stopped by the DVSA and enforcement authorities are overweight, and it’s often not managed, so it’s really good to see you’ve got so many procedures and training programmes in place to make sure you’ve got all of that covered.

Gareth: Safety is at the heart of everything Speedy do – we have a simple rule: “fit one extra strap, just in case”.

Simon: Wise words. So, if we look at how you manage driver behaviour first, your case study shows a 13% reduction in collisions in 2022 over 2021 and a 90% recovery of uninsured loss. What have been the key factors in those achievements? What have you been doing?

Gareth: I think what you must first look at when you look at driver behaviour is that you need the data to understand where the driving behaviours and where you can have some wins. And with regard to wins, if you think about speeding – well if someone is speeding, what usually comes after that is a harsh braking event. So, if you look at the harsh braking and speeding events together as one event, you’ll get two actual subjects that you can cover off. And again, it’s simple things like speaking with the drivers, looking at the time of days these speeding events are happening, looking at the level of the speeding event, looking at the harsh braking event.

That’s not to say all harsh braking events are a bad thing – if someone has seen something like a ball or a child running out from the side of the road, and a harsh braking event happens, then that’s a good thing. It means they’ve seen it; they’ve observed it.

Talking to our drivers, and going through their driving behaviour… we send out monthly reports to our Chief Operating Officer, and that’s cascaded all the way down to the Depot Manager who then speaks to the drivers – and we manage that locally. With regard to our recovery from our uninsured losses, we have a fantastic Claims Manager who came into the business 4 or 5 years ago now, and we now actively manage our uninsured loss recovery – and she does it very well, to the point where she managed to get in excess of 5 figures back last year. I think it’s an area that sometimes some people forget to actually claim back.

Simon: It can make a huge difference to the bottom line and allow you to invest that in other areas.

So, we’re talking about speeding and harsh braking events, and all that data comes from systems like telematics and cameras. It’s clearly something that all vehicle operators should be looking at – I think with nearly all the really impressive case studies we share on our website, those improvements have been achieved with the help of that kind of technology but for operators who don’t use telematics and cameras, the impression is that there’ll be a lot of push back from drivers. How would you recommend fleet safety managers start that process of implementation?

Gareth: With telematics, we’ve had telematics in our vehicles since 2009 with relative very little pushback on the telematics as I remember back then. Like with any telematics data, it’s like a phone – it does go out of signal, and there are areas of the country where sometimes the telematics data does drop its signal, or you can get what’s called a Dual Speed Alert – so you could be driving on the A168 in North Yorkshire, or you could be driving on the A1. And if you’re driving on the A1, the speed limit is 70, but on the A168 it’s only 50. But because both roads run parallel you do sometimes get a discrepancy.

But unless businesses are willing to fit the telematics, you’re never truly going to understand driver behaviour to the point where you can better manage it. With regard to the cameras, we first installed cameras into our vehicles in early 2013 to be compliant with the new FORS & CLOCS regulations. Subsequently, we’ve now increased our cameras to having left, right, front, rear, load, and driver facing. We have then subsequently integrated our camera system company into our telematics system company, so that in the event of a harsh event, where the G-force has been triggered, it will automatically download the footage from 5 seconds before, during and after. That alert is then sent through to myself, the Fleet Director and the Claims Manager to view the footage.

Simon: You’ve got to be able to see the context around each of those events.

Gareth: Yeah, it gives us what we call our Golden Hour to deal with the third party if we’re deemed as liable, but also, we can better understand how the incident has taken place and interview the driver.

Simon: If we look at your vehicles now, I know you put a lot of investment into safety technology like cameras. Are you fitting other sort of other safety technology and why?

Gareth: Yeah, every day is a new day at Speedy and like I said earlier, safety is at the heart of everything we do, we’re always on the lookout for the next bit of technology. We’ve already decided to fit the new AI cameras, which supersede Sidescan. So these take away the need for Sidescan at the front of the vehicle, and so takes away the false alerts when it’s constantly buzzing off for rainwater, flies, cars, street furniture, rain, dust. The new AI cameras actually identify a hazard so that’s really good, we’ve fitted those.

We’ve recently installed a system called the FHOSS, the cycle safety system, where it illuminates an orange laser line down the left side of the vehicle, 1 metre away from the vehicle that’s only shown when the vehicle is turning left, on the indication. The more visibility you can give to cyclists and vulnerable road users of the vehicle’s intentions then it’s better for all road users. Like I said earlier, the safety of all road users is paramount to Speedy, not just ourselves.

Simon: I want to now get onto the key piece for me. We’re publishing this podcast and your case study as part of our current quarterly focus which is on leadership and business benefits. So I want to ask how engaged the board and the rest of your senior leadership team are when it comes to managing driver safety, and how supportive they are with any new initiatives you want to pursue.

Gareth: First and foremost, the Fleet Director Aaron Powell used to do my role, so the support from him comes naturally as he’s been where I’ve been. Our CEO, Dan Evans, has worked in various positions around the Speedy business, in sales, in the hire desk at the depot, he’s even been a drop driver at one point and I have great admiration for Dan that he supports everything that myself, Aaron and the fleet team do – and it’s his words that safety is at the heart of everything Speedy do.

Simon: I know you’re very proud of the fact that Speedy’s whole fleet has been accredited to FORS Gold for the 9 years now and that, you don’t just put drivers through the courses, you put managers through the courses too. Why is that important?

Gareth: If you’re going to manage a driver, there’s no point putting a driver through that course if you don’t understand the importance of the course and what it’s going to deliver itself. Having the knowledge of the objectives that the course will give to the driver is not only beneficial to all other road users, it’s beneficial to you that you manage drivers. And our managers do sometimes use our vehicles, so why not? Training is a free subject when it’s internal, and what better can you get than upskilling your skills in an area that, like I said earlier, can benefit all other road users?

Simon: And road safety is a shared responsibility, isn’t it?

Gareth: It’s a shared responsibility. Everybody needs to be safe. So, everybody does the FORS training, even some of our staff who just take a van home at night because there’s nowhere safe to leave the vehicle at night, they will do that training – the pedestrian safety, the cycle safety, and all other training that goes with it.

Simon: Very good. So for any fleet safety managers looking to better engage their board, success generally comes from being able to measure and monitor fleet activity properly so you can quantify risk and measure improvements & present it to the board. What are the key metrics you focus on? How do you monitor and report on that data?

Gareth: So we monitor our driver behaviour, we monitor tachograph infringement, and also, we have a Post-Accident Review Group meeting. So every month we gather all the information from our accidents, post-accident, we review all the data and look for the blame, whether driver, third party or 50-50. We then decide on a course of action for that, whether that be online driver training, classroom training, or a 1-to-1 driver training day, or if it needs to go to the next step in line with our policy.

It’s about having the data to look into driver behaviour – you can’t just sit down with a driver and say, “you were speeding”. You need to look at when and where he was speeding, how long he was speeding. And then, like I say, understand why he was speeding - but also explain the dangers of speeding as well.

Simon: How closely do you work with your insurers, for instance, on understanding the incident data and claims data?

Gareth: Very well, so we work really well with our insurer and it is through our insurer that we initially put our Post-Accident Review Group together. That includes myself – the Road Risk Manager, Aaron Powell – the Fleet Director, our Claims Manager… but it also includes somebody from HR, and somebody from Health and Safety, so there’s a clear, unbiased decision of which direction we should take the person involved in the accident in. That’s held monthly, and like I say, we get buy-in from our insurer because we actively look at each incident.

Every accident is an invitation to an incident or an accident. It’s up to you whether you turn up to it.

Simon: Very good. Some great lessons there for fleet managers and driver safety managers. Thanks for your time today, Gareth.

I’ll put links to both Speedy’s website and Gareth’s LinkedIn profile in the show notes, and also links to the case study we’ve just published.

Thanks everyone for listening.

-------------------------

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don't forget to hit subscribe - so you know when the next episode is released - and please also give us a 5 star review as this helps us to get up the podcast rankings and makes it more visible to others who might also find it useful. You can follow us - that's @DrivingforBetterBusiness on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and most importantly, please help us to spread the word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets, and their employees who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let's Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode.

Weblinks

https://www.speedyservices.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/gareth-jones-62aab551/

Simon: Welcome to this edition of Let’s Talk Fleet Risk – a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.

Hi everyone, and welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk. My guest for this episode of the podcast is Peter Golding, who is the Founder and Managing Director of fleet management software specialists FleetCheck. Peter, welcome to the podcast.

Peter: Thank you Simon.

Simon: Now, a little-known fact is that FleetCheck was actually the first commercial organisation that partnered with Driving for Better Business. When I started as campaign manager way back in 2016, I wanted to create a useful online resource that would help engage our audience of Fleet Safety Managers. I’d already known Peter for a few years by then and the new FleetCheck had created an online Fleet Management questionnaire some years previously – but it wasn’t being heavily promoted, and needed updating.

Peter and I rewrote the questions, FleetCheck’s IT team did the programming for us and we relaunched it as the Driving for Better Business Gap Analysis, in partnership with FleetCheck. It’s now been through a couple of major updates since then, but our current Gap Analysis still has that original work at its core.

So, Peter, you’ve always put helping Fleet Managers in this type of way at the forefront of the FleetCheck ethos. So where does that come from?

Peter: Well, Simon, thank you – and I appreciate the opportunity of being on this podcast. For me, I suppose it sort of started with the 10 years at the beginning of my career working within the main dealer network, and experiencing the service sector. But really predominantly from the 15 years’ experience of running my own garages. During that time I’d come across hundreds and hundreds of businesses who we supported – it was obvious we were very essential to them maintaining their fleet. What I identified from that is there are literally tens of thousands of businesses out there who really are unaware of the challenges they have. In my industry, there are some very good software solutions out there – they were very much geared around the larger fleet operators.

At the heart of what we wanted to do with FleetCheck is be the voice of the SME. To build something really designed for the small to medium sized fleet operator. We focussed massively on the commercial vehicle fleet – so we look at the van and truck side, but especially the van side because it’s the area that is most often ignored. I wanted to create something that was intuitive and easy to use, and really help the sector that were ignored, in my opinion. And now I’m delighted to say we are the leading provider of support to the SME of fleet operators in the UK.

Simon: Yeah, and I can vouch for that because prior to DfBB I ran two small fleets; one with just a handful and then a second company which had about 10-12 cars. And this information just wasn’t available to me at the time. I wasn’t aware of the responsibilities. And it was very difficult to find that help and support. And what you’ve just been outlining would have been hugely helpful to me in both of those roles.

But another project we worked together on more recently – probably a couple of years ago now, when we originally launched it – is the Fleet Confidence Challenge, a free online course containing over 30 short videos in 3 modules. I think it takes just under a couple of hours to get through all of them.

The first module tells the story of a van driver involved in a serious accident with a car driver and a cyclist. And it goes on to examine where both the driver and the employer were at fault. And we use this scenario as the basis for a mock trial presentation that we did just last month – a mock trial prosecution of a company. Why did you want to create the challenge, and why did you ask us to get involved?

Peter: Well, I think one of the biggest issues is that the individuals that often operate fleets… some of them are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they have an interest in vehicles and they’ve been given the job of fleet or vehicles – management of the drivers – alongside their other roles. So what we have there is a challenge, where often the businesses that rely very much on these vehicles are being managed by somebody who hasn’t necessarily been given the formal training required or hasn’t got the time available to be able to properly and fully understand the implications.

What I wanted to do was created something intuitive and easy to engage with, and something relevant to the sector we were talking to. There’s been some fantastic work that’s been done previously, and I’ve seen information that can be associated with some very serious situations – the corporate manslaughter situations were, and still are, very prevalent – but it doesn’t apply necessarily to everyday events. And the challenge we wanted to create was something that every single business could easily experience.

Why with DfBB? Well, as you’ve already said Simon, I’m delighted with the work we’ve already done with you over so many years. And it seemed a really good fit working with you and creating something free-of-charge that was really a help to educate fleet operators – who, as I say, may not necessarily be trained. And maybe look at the sort of scenarios they might experience and identify perhaps the areas that they may not have initially thought about. So that was really at the heart of it – to provide an education tool that was free-of-charge and easily accessible to anyone who wanted it.

Simon: And it’s an interesting point, about the distinction between fatalities and injuries – obviously with the very big fleets in the country there is a statistical likelihood that they will have to deal with fatalities at some point, often more than one a year. But with the majority of companies with a small or medium-sized fleet, that’s possibly something they’ll never experience. The scenario we picked was about an injury collision with a cyclist, and we used that to our advantage with the mock trial, because there was a recent introduction of a new offence which is Causing Serious Injury by either Careless or Dangerous Driving, depending on the severity of the offence. And that makes it much more realistic to fleets, doesn’t it? Because according to government statistics, there’s about 40,000 a year of those.

Peter: Yeah, and I think that’s one of the important parts of it. When you look at the very small number of prosecutions for very, very serious accidents which escalate to the courts, if you look at serious injuries – I think, as you say, it’s in its thousands – but almost every business you talk to, even the smallest one, will have a driver running into the back of somebody at some stage, or reversing into a post, or maybe having a complaint from the general public. So we wanted to make it real, and as you say, I think the headline interests really were large corporate events and activities. But this is really designed to make it relevant to anyone, regardless of the size of the fleet they’re operating.

Simon: Obviously I’ve mentioned this mock trial presentation a couple of times now. It was at a 3-day Health and Safety Conference and we’ve got a video of that now available on the DfBB website, under the Events tab at the top – look for ‘Health and Safety Event 2023’ and you’ll find that there. But the purpose of that session, Peter, was to highlight the importance of accurate record keeping. So, why is that so important in your view?

Peter: What you have to be able to recognise is that you need to be able to demonstrate to the authorities that you are running a safe and legal fleet. So many of the businesses we talk to, and now almost a majority of those we support and help, are really reliant on spreadsheets, fragmented data that may be on whiteboards… a lot of what we try to do is to give companies that confidence that they can rely very much on remote access to data that’s a holistic view of what they’re trying to do, rather than looking at it in this fragmented way.

Often businesses we talk to have got leased vehicles with maintenance, and there’s a misconception within a lot of fleet operators that we talk to that because they lease these vehicles and maintenance is provided as part of the lease, that the leasing company themselves are responsible for record keeping. That they’re responsible for these vehicles being maintained correctly. And what we reinforce with them is that if something were to happen and they have a serious event with a vehicle that wasn’t properly maintained then it would be them in court, not the lease company. So, having records and having accurate information so that you can be confident you know what needs be done and when – you can only do that with a robust audit trail. And it should stand up. And if companies are investing in spreadsheets, and investment in time is where we’re looking at it, then you are massively exposed. Data could be deleted or easily corrected within that format.

Simon: Yeah, there are a couple of really important points to reinforce there. While you can delegate the management of that risk, i.e. the maintenance of the leased vehicles to the leasing company, you cannot delegate the ownership of the risk. The company always has the ownership and the responsibility to make sure that risk is managed. And it doesn’t matter what you did to manage that risk, what matters is that you can prove you did it, which is why record keeping is so important. So what are the key things that records need to be kept for? Those responsible for driver and vehicle safety, what should they be making sure that they accurately record?

Peter: Okay, really good question Simon. In fairness, the basis we start off with is get the essentials done first. It can sometimes feel like there is so much to do and they don’t know where to start. Our recommendation is exactly as you said – drivers and vehicles. Let’s focus on the fundamental requirements first. You should be confident that both the vehicles and their drivers are legal, and you can demonstrate that by appropriate record keeping.

So the areas that are prerequisite for drivers, for example, would be licence checking, medical records, training information – are they competent to drive the vehicle you’re putting them in? Incidents are something that happen so often that businesses are not recording information on. For example – a complaint from the general public. We had a scenario – I won’t say who – but it was a driver who was going the wrong way around a mini-roundabout in Swindon. And if anyone’s been to Swindon you will understand it is an experimental town with roundabouts. But this particular driver was going the wrong way and the general public sort of shouted at the driver and the driver and the driver flicked the v’s back in a sign written vehicle. To give you an example on that one, the pedestrian reported it and wrote to the directors, but he also copied Wiltshire Police in. Wiltshire Police arrived and wanted to know what the event was, if they had recorded it, and what actions had they taken on it.

And I think something as innocent as a complaint from the general public, or a speeding event, or a parking event, or reversing into a post… these things should be recorded. And looking at trends, a lot of businesses invest in telematics, and there can be frequent occurrences when you get speeding and things like that again. So, driver incidents and high-risk drivers are a key issue. Fitness to drive – are your drivers showing up to work fit to drive? This should be confirmed every time they’re in the vehicle.

The vehicle side – this is a big subject, and I’m only going to skirt over some of the areas, but you’ve got all the fundamental stuff. The road tax, the MOTs, the servicing. Probably the area that, as an engineer in my previous life… defect management is quite close to my heart. And if companies are – and a lot of businesses sadly aren’t – making sure the drivers are doing regular safety checks, it’s not just the inspections that the driver has done and defects there, the other area we do need to look at is advisory notifications coming through. So if you’re talking about recording information, it could be MOT records coming through, advisory notifications coming through from the garages letting you know the vehicle will need maintenance – maybe in 6 months’ time. But you combine that with some of the equipment fitted to vehicles, LOLER inspections, there’s a myriad of things across the board. So start off gently – get the basics first, but this really does illustrate what I said earlier about spreadsheets being an inadequate method of recording such an enormous range of data that’s required.

Simon: I’ve brought this up in a couple of conversations recently but an example that illustrates that very well is the Glasgow bin lorry incident where the driver had heart trouble while driving and crashed, killing a number of people. But Glasgow Council were exonerated of any blame because they were able to prove they’d done all the relevant checks and they had done everything reasonably practicable to ensure the driver and the vehicle were safe, so the driver was held fully responsible for that and his employer, by dint of their exceptional record keeping and procedures, were in the clear over that, which I think is what all of our audience would be hoping for.

Peter: Yes, but I think I said earlier, a smaller enterprise which doesn’t have the same level of infrastructure could easily have fallen foul and failed to have asked the appropriate questions or have the audit trail to prove that that’s being done. Fitness to drive, within our walkaround inspection app, is the very first thing that drivers have got to say before they actually drive the vehicle in the morning. Are you under the influence of alcohol or drugs? Are there any medical conditions that could impair you? So it’s not something they do once. They do it every single time they get in the vehicle.

Simon: When we did our mock trial presentation, the fictional company we presented in the court got a lot of things wrong. Where do you commonly see fleets make mistakes with record keeping?

Peter: Well as I said earlier, it is to do with defect management and how often there is a lot of focus on making sure the drivers are completing inspections on vehicles to prove there are nil defects on vehicles. This is so important – not to prove there’s nothing wrong with the vehicle, it’s so that when there is something wrong, it’s being identified and tracked through. We’ve unfortunately heard many cases before we get involved where drivers complained that they are regularly letting the office know that there is something wrong with the vehicle, but nobody actually takes any action on it. So it is a matter of getting this data and doing something with it. And ensuring that they can prove beyond any doubt that the vehicle is not only being maintained in accordance with the manufacturers service intervals, but also that the vehicle – especially now, because gone are the days when we could inspect a vehicle and be fairly confident that it would be maintained properly – now the onus and responsibility is very much on the operator of the vehicle, not the garage. With the extended service intervals of 2 years, 40,000 miles, it is the company’s responsibility to make sure the vehicle is legal.

The other area we do see companies fall foul on is licence checking. Often, they’ll be quite vigilant at the beginning when drivers first start, with the appropriate documentation to prove they can drive. This should be risk-based, and done on a regular basis – minimum once a year. If they have more points, then it should be done more frequently. But we do see companies often just assuming that they can just look at the plastic part of the licence and think they’re fit to drive. Or even just use their national insurance details and their driving licence number to go in and get the data from the DVLA. That is something no company should do. It’s a breach of the data protection and security areas on that so every company should be really careful to properly risk manage their drivers. It’s a criminal offence to drive a vehicle without a licence so it’s a fundamental requirement. That and managing defects are just two of the areas that I would highlight.

Simon: And managing defects – if you don’t deal with them, small defects can turn into larger defects quite quickly. We’ve obviously got the cost of living crisis and everything from vehicle repairs to fuel and insurance costs are going through the roof. So surely keeping proper track of fleet activity can make quite a significant contribution to cost control?

Peter: Absolutely. If you’re talking about a very common advisory – it would be that when brake pads themselves are getting low, failure to replace those on time means you’re going to have to buy new discs, new pads… the cost could be 3 or 4 times the amount, not taking into consideration the down time that brings. And the last forecast of that I saw averaged between £700-800, and I’ve seen many companies where there are multiple drivers and the cost of vehicles being off the road for a day can be much higher than that.

As far as the maintenance and management of that side is concerned… it’s preventative maintenance. I’m always going to be an advocate of this as an engineer. We are seeing vehicles being kept on fleet longer now than ever. There are critical events that need to be done – for example a cam belt is something that if you’ve only had a vehicle for 3 or 4 years and you’ve run it up to 80,000 or 100,000 miles this might be something that you’ve never experienced needing replacing but a cam belt failure, in a lot of cases you could write the vehicle off. So these are preventative maintenance issues but being proactive rather than reactive can substantially reduce the downtime, and if you are relying on vehicles staying on fleet now longer than in the past, you really do need to look at this very carefully. It’s really important.

Simon: Now, we often talk about fleet safety, and historically we’ve been talking to fleet managers – and a lot of them are responsible for driver safety, but a lot of them really only have responsibility for fleet as more of a procurement and maintenance role. And we’ve recently realised that a huge part of our audience are safety managers. Not fleet managers, but safety managers, and driver safety comes under their remit. And research shows that driver safety is consistently in the top 3 concerns for safety professionals at all levels. So, they understand the relevant legislation – the Health and Safety at Work Act – but they don’t always understand how driver safety fits into that. So, what would you think was the most important thing for them to focus on? They’re not fleet professionals but safety professionals with a responsibility for vehicles and drivers.

Peter: It’s a good question. And one that across all organisations we talk to is one of the biggest challenges. But it is communicating with drivers – that’s the number 1 thing businesses have got to do. If you look at the first step, it’s creating, communicating and monitoring your policy and making sure it is in circulation, that all of the drivers are confirming they’ve got it, receipts that they’ve got it. And any updates that are required to go through. So the focus on fleet is around what fleet managers are dealing with. And the single biggest challenge they’ve got is the drivers and what they’re doing. Telematics can play a part, but only one part. It doesn’t actually eliminate the responsibility – if anything it heightens that requirement to look at the data and act on it. It can be very useful to prove where people are at certain times – for example when then are events, an accident or something, it can exonerate the driver and prove that they weren’t responsible.

We talked already about safety checks, as far as the fundamental requirements – we’ve seen this a lot – because it’s difficult to do, a lot of businesses have a policy to say that vehicles should be inspected, but they don’t adhere to it, and the drivers don’t get chased, so they really condone it in that type of attitude. And if something awful happened, the drivers would say ‘I know I’ve agreed to this, but nobody asked me for it’, so it’s important to be constant. And if there are problems and people aren’t doing what they need to… and let’s be fair, everything to do with fleet management is common sense. The vehicles need to be legal – you cannot have a vehicle with tyres less than 1.6mm. We’d recommend less than 2mm. 3mm is a far safer option. These are common sense areas companies should look at. Can they all with confidence go out into a car park and look at every vehicle they’ve got – and often the tyre companies come and do an audit for you – and to prove whether or not the vehicles have got legal tyres on them. And I think about 60% of the tyres in tyre depots are replaced while they’re illegal. How many of those could affect organisations that you’re talking to now?

But I would finish it with one of the biggest problems we see – although communication is absolutely imperative – you have to have senior management buy in and recognise the importance so there is that authority, that push. So when there are drivers not adhering to what they should be doing because it’s getting the job done rather than making sure the vehicle is safe, senior management should be supporting fleet managers or safety managers to give that strength there to make sure there is adherence to it.

Simon: My final question Peter is this – at the top of the discussion, in the first question, we were talking about how common it is for people to manage fleet activity and safety on spreadsheets and paper bases and filing systems. What are the main benefits that come from using a proper integrated fleet management software solution over those traditional paper-based systems?

Peter: I often refer to what’s happened in the world of accountancy. If you look 15 or 20 years ago, they were bookkeepers. They were manually keeping records, and this was very labour intensive. Nowadays, HMRC have mandated that you have got to submit returns electronically, and we’re seeing a trend now towards this in the fleet industry. And really, we would expect to see within 5 or 10 years that this will be the norm. If you are submitting defects, or operating HGVs and on the Earned Recognition Scheme… as a prerequisite for that from the DVSA, you have to submit electronic record keeping and prove that the vehicles are being inspected correctly, MOTs are being carried out correctly, and the failure rates are appropriate. And you have to make sure that the vehicles themselves are checked for safety.

So I think it’s an inevitability. We’ve seen it in some respects where the road tax has been removed from screens many years ago now. Driving licence paper mandates and MOT records being computerised. So I think it’s an inevitability, digitalising data. Why? Well, you can look at, for example, fuel analysis – an area we often work with businesses on that maybe spend two days a month pulling all the data across to try and prove what the consumption figures are – which we would definitely recommend everyone does. We can do that for them in a 5-minute report. So we can save two days’ work.

So there are massive benefits in time saving. I’ve not yet met anyone who’s operating fleets who wouldn’t agree that time is one of the single biggest challenges they have. Also, we’ve talked about this, the cost of fleet – it’s the second largest overhead outside of payroll, often. Putting controls into that… accurate record keeping means you can start running meaningful reports and look at where savings can be made. We’ve talked about vehicles running for a longer period of time nowadays – so even more time and effort needs to be put in to look at which of those vehicles should stay on fleet, which ones shouldn’t.

But at the heart of what we’re talking about today is the awareness and duty of care and Health and Safety implications. And what we do see in the hundreds of companies and thousands of vehicles we manage is this peace of mind that you have when all of your information is in a central database, accessible remotely. And assurance that if anything happens, that you can very, very quickly verify what’s been done and when it’s been done. So peace of mind, time saving, and cost savings are the three main benefits that you get from the investment. And the return on that investment is very, very easy to show. But fundamentally there is a legal requirement to manage your vehicles correctly. And I think from my side, often vehicles now are equipped with very high standards of equipment – cameras, telematics… so the vehicles themselves are with all the right safety measures.

Really, you should be giving the person whose job it is to manage those vehicles the tools to do it. And that’s really what we do.

Simon: Fantastic. I would agree whole-heartedly with all of that. I’ll put some links to resources in the show notes for this episode. FleetCheck and Driving for Better Business collaborated on the Gap Analysis which you can find on the DfBB website – I’ll put a link to that. I’ll also put a link to the Fleet Confidence Course, FleetCheck’s free online introductory course. And as part of that, Peter you mentioned that one of the first key points was getting your Driving for Work policy written and communicated to drivers, and there’s a free, fully editable Driving for Work policy as part of that Fleet Confidence Course, so that could be interesting there. But Peter, thank you very much for your time today.

Peter: Thank you very much for inviting me.

___________________________________________________________________

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don't forget to hit subscribe - so you know when the next episode is released - and please also give us a 5 star review as this helps us to get up the podcast rankings and makes it more visible to others who might also find it useful. You can follow us - that's @DrivingforBetterBusiness on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, and most importantly, please help us to spread the word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets, and their employees who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let's Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode.

My guest this month is a legal expert in the field of transport and regulatory law. It’s Chris Green, who is a partner at law firm Keoghs. Welcome to the podcast, Chris.

Chris: Hello, Simon. How are you?

Simon: Very well thank you. Now, I’ve asked Chris onto the show because we’re partnering with Keogh’s to present a mock trial prosecution of a van operator at this year’s Health and Safety event at the NEC later this month. The mock trial presentation will be on Wednesday 26th April in DfBB’s own Driver Safety Theatre – and I’ll give out full details at the end of the podcast.

Now Chris, I don’t want to give the game away as to what happens during this prosecution, but I do want to give a preview of the scenario and then discuss in some broad terms some of the issues that we’re going to be looking at in the presentation.

So, the scenario – roughly speaking – is that a van driver struck a cyclist shortly after starting a morning shift. And it’s a serious incident, with the cyclist taken to hospital and he’s in a pretty bad way – the police have classed his condition as critical. The police would then obviously conduct a roadside investigation to find out what had happened and to find out whether the driver was at fault – what might have happened that had gone wrong. So what would they be looking for in that investigation?

Chris: A couple of things. In the first instance they would have Forensics and Scenes of Crimes Officers present, to see – for example – where there were broken fragments from the car, and to indicate where the collision had taken place. So that might assist in terms of the position of each vehicle in the road, or to gather witness statements from those who were present. These days we see a lot of this is covered by dashcam footage or other CCTV – so that element of the job, many years ago when I started, I’m afraid has gone out of it. So that’s all done for us on a very high-tech, automated level these days. They would be interviewing the driver at the scene and checking suspected drugs or alcohol issues. They’d be asking to see the mobile phone records and potentially seizing it as well. And in addition to that they would be trying to obtain accounts from anybody present and to check the welfare of anybody injured in the collision, including the driver and anybody else as well.

So there’s a number of things they would be doing, and then of course the investigation would carry on afterwards where they would begin the interview process.

Simon: What about the state of the vehicle? How much attention would they give to the roadworthiness of the vehicle at that point?

Chris: It’s absolutely critical, because if there were any suggestion that there were mechanical failure that was either outside of the control of the driver, or something that had manifested itself between the time they started the journey and the time of the crash, then they’ve got to at least explore that possibility before they can decide how blameworthy the driver was. Occasionally I’m afraid, there are still cases that we deal with where there are examples where the vehicle just wasn’t in a serviceable condition, and on that basis it’s a different scenario in terms of trying to establish guilt.

Simon: So, we know that in law the driver is usually responsible for ensuring that the vehicle is safe and that they drive within the highway code. So, what potentially could lead the collision investigators to look beyond the driver and at the employer?

Chris: Well, the employer has still got a duty to protect both the employee who’s driving the car and anybody else who might be affected by that. And in addition to that, any employees who may be carried in the vehicle at the same time as the driver. So, that obligation is actually quite wide. If, for example, there were any suggestion that the employer wasn’t carrying out either mechanical inspections, or didn’t have a policy on the use of mobile phones, drugs and alcohol, eyesight, and these sort of issues, and monitoring the hours that the driver was working… then these days, those are all aspects that the police can and will be looking for. Because there is the potential to bring in the employer as well.

Simon: You mentioned policy there, so let’s delve a little deeper into that. Whenever I’ve seen prosecutions like this in the press, normally reported where there’s are a fatality, they seem to hinge around policy. And those that are found guilty have either failed to implement or failed to follow and establish policy, whereas employers that are found not guilty were generally able to prove that they did have the right policies in place, and that they were rigorously followed and monitored. So, what typical examples do you see of poor practice from a policy point of view, and more importantly what impact would this have on their case in court?

Chris: The thing is with prosecutors, sometimes I wonder whether my opponent is believing that the very fact that an accident has taken place is evidence of the breach. So in other words, you couldn’t have had an accident if all was complied with, and that in itself generates the suspicion that they’re negligent. I’m not sure it’s quite like that, but take for example a case I had recently where it was a company which was really loath to be amending their mobile phone policy. We sat down and, once we’d really spent some time to consider whether the mobile phones were actually necessary in the business, through gritted teeth some people had to concede that actually they probably didn’t need it. So, really, the answer to your question is that they’ve got to be really clear on the test of reasonably practicable. And there is a balance to be struck between the cost and the time and the inconvenience on one side of things – in terms of implementing further measures – and on the other, the risk involved.

So, if that is balanced for example against a serious or fatal incident, then the bar is set quite high. And I think in the first instance, a court and a police prosecutor might want to prove that they’ve actually considered all of the right factors. They’ve then, as you say, got to implement anything that comes out of that process, and then critically, to follow it on the road as well. So it is quite an onerous duty, but whenever things go wrong, with reverse engineering, they would be looking to see whether that’s all been done as it should have been.

Simon: Now, we’re going to be prosecuting a company in our mock trial presentation, so, it’s a fictitious incident obviously but the investigation in this case must have obviously raised some serious concerns about the way the company managed driver safety. And you mentioned a couple of things there that a policy needs to include – mobile phones, driver fatigue, that kind of thing – there are other things as well like driver checks, vehicle defect reporting, that kind of thing. These are all things that should be included in a policy, so how would you expect companies to manage these things and what impact does managing it poorly have in a prosecution?

Chris: Well, the onus is on them. The balance of probabilities there that they would need to demonstrate – i.e. it’s more likely than not that they comply – but the key point is the onus is actually on the company to prove they’re innocent rather than the other way around. So, if I’m prosecuting Health and Safety offences, all I need to show is that the individual was an employee – well that’s usually straightforward, that the company employs people – and that there had been an accident. So, as soon as I’ve established those two factors as a prosecutor, then the onus shifts to the defendant – in this case the company – and they would need to prove they’d done everything they reasonably could, and there’s law on that that suggests that that’s got to be not only in disproportion, but it’s arguably got to be grossly disproportionate, and it’s only those things that you’re entitled not to do as a company.

If roughly the time and the expense involved in putting that measure in place doesn’t look totally out of kilter with the risk of a serious or fatal accident, then really the onus is on you to take that step, or at least explain – having gone through the assessment process – why you don’t think it’s practical. So, be it on your head, and then – as you say – it’s then got to be followed through by the individuals out on the road.

Simon: So, the onus in on the employer to prove that they’re innocent. That would suggest that record-keeping is pretty important, yes?

Chris: Well it would. It’s really sad in my line of work where it’s quite clear that a company has good processes and the custom of practice is that it’s usually followed by people. But of course, many times where there has been a fatal accident, the absence just of one document ironically could be the one that would prove that the measure the company needed to demonstrate it had taken – there’s just no evidence on the point. So, some HSE inspectors say to me that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence – so if it’s not documented it didn’t exist. So, I’m afraid it won’t be the first time a lawyer’s said this, but the key point behind what you’ve said is that you don’t just need to take the step, you need a mechanism to gather and collate and keep the proof of that as well, else it does leave you fairly vulnerable as I’m sure we might see at the trial.

Simon: It’s not just proving that you’ve done something, you’ve implemented a step or a policy now I guess, is it. Because, a key part of this is ensuring that you monitor compliance of that step or policy or procedure – whatever it is. And that you prove you take appropriate action if people are found to be cutting corners or routinely missing those steps out – whether it’s a vehicle check, for instance, and that’s not getting done. So it’s as important to monitor compliance and take appropriate action in the event of non-compliance as it is to put that step in place as well, I guess isn’t it?

Chris: That’s right. There has to come a point where the company has done all it can reasonably could and I think relying on good common sense will go a long way in that. If you’ve got drivers, for example, who are just routinely signing documents to say that something’s happened when it clearly hasn’t, then really the onus is on them – that’s a false statement. Equally, however, it is important that there is some supervisory mechanism in place and that checks are undertaken to establish the procedures are being followed as they should be. But again, sadly, practice tells that it is quite common after some of these incidents that the individual driver who may not have followed the policy may not be the only one who hasn’t followed the policy, or you can’t prove that the other have as well.

So you can see how that would play out, and this is where prosecutors perhaps start getting a bit of an inkling that there is a bigger problem, a more widespread failing as part of the company’s obligations.

Simon: My final question I think here Chris is to ask you about what offences we would typically be looking at here. Years ago there was a great big focus on corporate manslaughter for instance, but my understanding is that’s a difficult thing to prove. I’m not aware of any prosecutions – successful prosecutions – under that. But, what offences would we be looking at and what would be the legislation that those would fall under?

Chris: Sure, well if we looked outside out window on any given day, I dare say we’d probably all conclude that there are examples of driving that falls into the first category which is ‘Careless Driving’ – failure to meet the standards of the reasonably prudent and competent driver, in a way that would be obvious to the reasonable, prudent and competent driver. So that isn’t a very high bar to overcome. Clearly if we prosecuted all of those then the criminal justice system would grind to a halt in no time at all.

Where there is a serious injury involved, then clearly the resources that the Police and the Crown Prosecution Service would devote to the case right from the outset are that much higher. So the second category would be ‘Causing Serious Injury by Careless Driving’, so you’re very much really bound by the consequences rather than necessarily the standard of the driving. As we go up the scale of seriousness, if the serious injury has been caused by dangerous driving – so it’s what I’ve just said there but it’s falling far below those standards, rather than just below those standards – then you can go further up the scale depending on the injury and the standard of the driving.

So at the very top end of the scale, as far as those categories are concerned, would then be causing death – if for whatever reason there is a fatality involved, and the injured party doesn’t make it through – then ‘Causing Death by Careless or Dangerous Driving’ would actually be another offence, and carry a serious penalty.

You’re right as far as manslaughter and corporate manslaughter goes, it’s rare. What I can tell you is that the Health and Safety Executive are looking for cases with big, well-known defendants and corporate entities, or entities with deep pockets. So really the key from this end is that you have been warned. So there are a range of offences available to any prosecutor.

Simon: And so, our audience for the mock trial… it’s at the Health and Safety Event, so our audience largely is Health and Safety professionals who would be very familiar with the Health and Safety at Work Act, and the Management of Health and Safety Regulations. Would offences get prosecuted under that?

Chris: They can do. What we often see is that there might be a prosecution of the driver, alongside that of the company. Sometimes I wonder whether it’s put on a little bit of a plea bargain to try and exact a guilty plea out of the company, in exchange for a better deal for the driver, but that’s a maybe. Wherever there is evidence that something that the company has done is either widespread and a failing, and/or usually has actually played in the part in the injury and in the poor driving, then prosecutors will not be afraid at all to bring the company in as well.

So, straight away you see that anything mechanical would be an issue for the company rather than the driver. But it does go wider than that, as we said. So mobile phone policies, eyesight, hours, fatigue, drugs and alcohol, and one or two more. These days we’ve seen a bit of a change in how the prosecutors are viewing these, right from day one. And unashamedly they’re looking for corporate liability as well as the driver.

Simon: What’s the likely punishment for a company if it was prosecuted under the Health and Safety at Work Act?

Chris: Well this is the difficulty we often find – that even Health and Safety professionals who perhaps are more used to the idea of a workplace accident would not necessarily link in the possibility that a road traffic accident would be dealt with in the same way, because of course they’re usually dealt with by the police; there’s an agreement in place between them and the HSE. But wherever the incident looks as if it might be work-related, or there is something in the background, the problem for them is that it’s actually dealt with under the same guidelines as it would be for any other Health and Safety offence. That’s where you’re getting into the realms of turnover-based fines, and that’s where I’m afraid we have seen some of the fines going into the millions for big, well-known companies with large turnovers.

Simon: And just a final point on that, then. Obviously, those were corporate responsibilities, but the Health and Safety at Work Act has provision for prosecuting individuals, where they haven’t either put the right policies in place, or they failed to follow what was an established safety policy and that’s resulted in someone getting injured, or potentially killed. So there’s scope within the Health and Safety at Work Act for prosecuting individuals and the punishments for those can be quite severe as well, can’t they?

Chris: They can. Under Section 37, senior-ish managers who are part of the company’s strategic brain, if you will, that have a say over what the company does and how it does it… if they’ve personally involved in this, or turned blind eyes, don’t have a policy, know it’s not being followed, or worse still, contributed to the commission of the offence, then they too can be held personally liable. Again, it often comes as a surprise to a few people that those are imprisonable. They can be 2 years in prison in very, very serious cases – and they are rare – but that power is out there already.

Simon: Fantastic. Ok, Chris, thank you so much for sharing your insight with that. Hopefully that’s given our audience a taster, or encouraged them to see how that mock trial prosecution plays out when we enact that later on this month. Where can people get hold of you Chris if they’d like some advice from you professionaly?

Chris: The email address is cbgreen@keoghs.co.uk. But if they’re on LinkedIn, or some of the other social media, the firm is Keogh’s. Very happy to help, and any one of the team will be familiar with this, whatever part of the country you’re in.

Simon: Brilliant, well I’ll put all of those links in the show notes and also to the Health and Safety Event. It runs from Tuesday 25th to Thursday 27th of April, and the mock trial presentation will be starting at 11am on the second day – Wednesday 26th April. It’s in the Driver Safety Theatre, which is part of the Health and Safety Event in Hall 3 at the NEC. We’ll be looking at good practice, and the consequences of poor practice, and there will also be some packs for our audience to take away as well. Chris, if you could give us one thing that you think would be really important for people to come and see and take away from that, what would you say?

Chris: When you see how these cases pan out in court – we’ll try and make this as realistic as we possibly can in the time that we have – the bit that people often say to us is “I didn’t realise it was like that”. And the other comment is usually really when something is tested at that level of scrutiny, as you would employ a lawyer to do, often your answers do not survive the evidence. And seeing it in this very graphic way I think is very helpful because it will send a message out to those who might need a bit of a refresher back at base.

Simon: Brilliant. Well in addition to the mock trial, there’s a packed agenda in that theatre as well – we’ve got three days of content, panel discussions, examples of good practice. We’ve published a full agenda on the Driving for Better Business website, at drivingforbetterbusiness.com/events, and hopefully we’ll see some of you there. So Chris, thank you again, and I’ll see you in a couple of weeks at the NEC.

***********************

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to

those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful

resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to

access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don’t forget to hit subscribe - so you

know when the next episode is released. And please also give us a 5-star review, as

this helps us to get up the podcast rankings, and makes it more visible to others who

might also find it useful. You can follow us – that’s Driving for Better Business on

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And most importantly, please help us to spread the

word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets and their employees

who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward

to welcoming you to the next episode.

Welcome to the podcast Lisa.

Lisa: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me.

Simon: So, Lisa, you’re an Associate Professor of Driving Behaviour and Director of the Driving Research Group at Cranfield University. You previously founded companies like DriverMetrics, you were co-founder of The Floow. But you’ve now founded a new company called PsyDrive – all of which were to, kind of, commercialise some of the valuable research that you’ve done and make those learnings available to fleet operators. So, perhaps you could start by telling us a little bit about what you’re working on at the moment.

Lisa: Sure. So, with Cranfield, some of the work I’m doing right now is looking at behavioural adaptation in response to autonomous vehicles. And so, we’re running a series of studies in the field, looking at how people change their behaviour in response to automated systems over time. A lot of people think that driverless vehicles are going to be safer, but I think there are some things that we really need to understand a bit more about first.

So that’s my work with Cranfield. And then, with PsyDrive I essentially developed an accredited CPD course on Human Factors in driving, which is available for fleet managers and anybody working in the fleet industry really, to help them understand a bit more about driver behaviour.

Simon: Excellent. Now, this episode of our podcast is part of a range of content we’ve created this quarter around the theme of fitness to drive – which obviously covers physical and mental health, fatigue, wellbeing etc. – and so I wanted to start with an overview of the general demands of driving for work on the driver. We’re focusing generally on commercial vehicle drivers – so vans and trucks – and those drivers are probably doing reasonably high mileages across the year. So I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about what the general demands are for those of us who are largely office based and probably wouldn’t be aware of the demands on a commercial vehicle driver out there all day.

Lisa: Yeah, and that’s an important distinction, because a lot of people who are not driving for work really don’t understand some of the problems of actually driving a truck or a van, and some of the demands that drivers have. Often professional drivers complain about how the road users get in their way, and make things a bit more difficult for them because they don’t really understand things like turning circles, just being able to get around a corner and how they need to be considerate of what a big truck needs. So, yeah, there are a lot of stresses on professional drivers – not only just the type of vehicle that they’re driving, but also the nature of the work. What it is they have to do during the day. Some of the professional drivers have multi-drop kind of activities, others are long-haul, short-haul… it all varies. And they have to engage with customers and these are often quite stressful situations, especially if they’re running late. Management, supervisory practices… and of course there are a lot of issues around the traffic, and having to get through traffic to a tight schedule.

Simon: So I guess the main pressures sort of revolve around workload and time pressure. I often describe these when I’m talking to fleet operators, or warn them against creating unrealistic work schedules where it often doesn’t seem possible to make all of those deliveries, or all of those service visits within the expected time, without the driver having to speed or take other risks. So what does that kind of pressure… what sort of impact does that have on the drivers?

Lisa: Yeah. So, all drivers at some time or other will suffer from driver stress just because of the nature of driving these days. Traffic’s actually moving slower every year, so there are just general demands of the task itself. The work involved in manoeuvring a vehicle is actually quite resource intensive. And so, it can be quite high on workload. For example, the road environment itself represents quite a high workload – for example, if there’s poor visibility, or poor road markings or road surfaces. These are all things that professional drivers have to negotiate their way through, and it adds to the workload. And then, if they’re on a difficult route, or they’re having to perform difficult manoeuvres – perhaps having to park in very restricted areas… they also have a lot of different tasks to do at the same time. You know, thinking about work. And these kinds of situations mean that there are quite large fluctuations in the demands placed on professional drivers during the day.

So, the impact really can have a very negative impact on things like blood pressure and stress hormones – the research is… there are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of studies to show how driver stress can impact on these physiological measures.

Simon: Now, I know a lot of us talk to our delivery drivers when they turn up at home to gauge what kind of pressures they’re under. And following on from that last point, not only is excessive workload and time pressure really hard for them to cope with at times, but then many of them have their routes planned down to the very last minute. And so, if they encounter roadworks or congestion – those unexpected delays and diversions can probably really compound that, can’t they?

Lisa: Yes, that’s right. Whenever driving is externally paced and not self-paced, it becomes a demand. So professional drivers, delivery drivers, they often have performance targets to achieve. And, you know, if they’re being held up for whatever reason, then there are going to be impacts on the way in which they feel and how they tend to behave. So, for example, they’ll tend to get more irritable, more frustrated, more aggressive. And really develop quite an unpleasant, angry mood in some cases. And that can be quite difficult to deal with as another road user, when you see this quite hostile delivery van driver trying to get past you. And yeah, these are some of the everyday experiences that professional drivers have to go through I’m afraid.

Simon: Many drivers work odd hours, as well. Some of them have very long days, some of them are doing shift patterns, unsociable hours. And I know that one or two long days will do me in. Probably the same for most of us. So, how does that consistent, day-in day-out, long hours and unsociable hours – how does that impact on their general wellbeing?

Lisa: Yeah, there are very strong cumulative effects of fatigue, for example. The sort of, general wear-and-tear of doing this kind of job day-in, day-out, can have quite a terrible impact on their health. One of the first things that often goes when people are stressed is that they sleep quite badly – they can’t relax when they get home after work, they can’t switch off and have a good night’s sleep. And then, of course, stress itself is fatiguing. Because you’re operating the system at a very high spec, if you like. You’re trying to cope with all of these demands and that’s really quite fatiguing. So, yeah, there’s a general impact on wellbeing, such that there can be some really negative impacts on health.

Simon: And, it can sort of feed on itself, can’t it, then? Because if you’re taking stress from work home, and that’s causing you to sleep badly, you could have other areas where you’re bringing the pressures of home to work. Cases like those who have got a new baby in the house, or maybe have got financial worries, or other things. You’re bringing pressures to work, and the pressures of work are compounding it and going back home, and it just gets progressively worse.

Lisa: That’s right, and recently I’ve been looking into Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which sounds like it’s a clinical condition that not many people have but, in fact, it mostly goes undiagnosed. And that’s a classic case of the chronic exposure to stress that can build up.

Let’s say, for example, you’ve had some very bad news at home, perhaps a close family member or friend has been diagnosed with a terminal illness or something of that nature. And then you have to go into this work environment where it’s quite stressful. It’s difficult because you’re going to be distracted by what’s going on at home and bring that into the work environment as a driver.

Simon: Yeah. I did a recent podcast on the increasing problem of drug driving, and how the police in many areas are now catching more drug drivers than alcohol. And actually, a lot of those turned out to be – in some cases, sort of half the offenders – turned out to be commercial vehicle drivers. So where we’ve got drivers experiencing these pressures, presumably quite a few of them are turning to drink and drugs as coping mechanisms for that stress. Which again, similar to the cycle of pressures building up between home and work, it’s a further destructive downward spiral, isn’t it?

Lisa: That’s right, and yeah, obviously these rather unhealthy coping strategies that commercial drivers might turn to – it’s sort of like a quick fix, if you like, to get you out of that state at that moment. You know, have a drink, have some kind of drug that would actually make you feel better. But, it is a destructive downward spiral because eventually, that will reduce your ability to actually handle stress in the long-term.

There are far better coping strategies that can be used to kind of offset the sedentary lifestyle nature of driving for work. Often we see that there are issues around diet and smoking as well as drugs and alcohol. So it’s about opening up other kinds of coping strategies that are much more effective.

Simon: Yeah, you mentioned diet and sedentary lifestyle there. And obviously, being a van driver or a commercial vehicle driver, you’re pretty much sat down for the vast majority of the day. Little exercise, unless you’re a multi-drop driver then you might get a bit of exercise. But the diet thing is really bad, isn’t it? And one of the things I’ve heard anecdotally, talking to our delivery drivers and others as well is dehydration, and the problem that can bring to the ability to make the right decisions. Because their work schedules are often so tightly controlled that they don’t get time for a comfort break, so consequently, a lot of them won’t drink enough water during the day because they haven’t got the time to then stop for a break later on. So what kind of effect does that have on their ability to make the right decisions when they’re on the road?

Lisa: Well these are some of the problems that are out there. And essentially, there’s only so much that the driver can do. It really is down to the employer in many situations to make sure that these rest breaks are built in, and there is support for drivers if they want to pursue a more healthy lifestyle – perhaps access to a gym, or there’s some kind of help with giving up on smoking, and eating better. There’s all sorts that’s actually possible.

Because, one of the things that we’ve talked about is how these coping strategies actually have a very poor impact on health in the long run. And it’s not surprising that truck drivers in particular are known for having much higher risk of developing chronic diseases. And that in itself has an impact on crash risk.

Simon: Let’s talk about crash risk, then. We’ve talked about a lot of the things that affect a driver’s wellbeing. What do driver managers need to understand about the effect that all of these have on the long-term health and the likelihood of their drivers being involved in incidents?

Lisa: So, there’s a kind of potentially immediate impact of some of the coping strategies that people used. So, if, for example, drivers took a brisk walk during a break, that would have a much stronger impact on their mood and their ability to perform at a higher level than just sitting around having a coffee, or a carb-high snack.

But if there’s some support that employers can offer, then you’ve got the chance of being able to improve the immune system’s ability to cope with diseases and problems that they can encounter. And we know, for example, that drivers with cardiovascular disease are twice as likely to have a crash and be at fault for that crash, compared with a healthier driver. And we know that there are several studies showing how people involved in crashes with chronic diseases are much more likely to see a fatal outcome. So, there are some very strong reasons why it’s important to manage stress when driving for work.

Simon: Do you know why that is? Why there’s that increase in risk if you’ve got a disease – is it people worrying about the disease? Is it symptoms while they’re driving? What’s causing it?

Lisa: It could be a number of things. Certainly, it could affect your ability to process information. If you have a cardiovascular disease, then your information processing capacity could be reduced which might affect your ability to check for hazards and respond appropriately. So, there are a number of reasons why that might be. It could be muscular-skeletal as well, it could be something to do with how well you’re able to manoeuvre. A lot of issues for truck drivers I’m afraid is being slightly overweight – and that can impact on their ability to look around the cab, in the manner that they should before making their manoeuvre.

Simon: Okay, so let’s come around to solutions, then. Now, you and I have met many times at safety conferences and the one thing that’s always struck me when you’ve been speaking is the importance that you put on evidence-led interventions. So, what would your advice be to managers about how to identify and manage driver stress effectively?

Lisa: Well this is an interesting one, because one of the issues around stress when driving for work is that people generally don’t say how they feel. For obvious reasons, because if they were to say to their manager, “I’m feeling really stressed, I didn’t sleep last night, I’m really worried about this”, they might not be able to work. And they need the work. It would just add to their stress if they were told that they have to go home and not work today. So, self-report for stress is not always reliable. So, I’m a big advocate of immunising the workforce, if you like, and making sure that everybody has some stress management strategies under their belt.

And that’s not to say that it’s all the driver’s responsibility, because there are many organisational factors that can impact on driver stress. I think companies should do whatever they can do to reduce stress at the top-level down. But, from the driver’s perspective, there are ways in which you can reduce distracted driving. And there is an evidence base around this. Essentially, what we’re doing within PsyDrive is to deliver progressive relaxation techniques to improve driver anger and aggression.

Because what you’re trying to get to is for drivers to adopt a more adaptive approach to driving, than a reactive one. Because if they’re adapting to whatever comes their way, in a kind of accepting manner, rather than a rejecting one and reacting to whatever’s going on around them – here you’re going to see some of the behaviours that we’ve talked about – you’re going to see the irritability, the close-following, the speeding, and all the kinds of behaviours that tend to lead to crashes.

Simon: You mentioned there about obviously drivers not being forthcoming about stress, because they need the work and they might get sent home or whatever. But the employer’s kind of treading a fine line as well, isn’t it – between what they should do, which is taking more account of this and trying to put their drivers under less stress, or if a driver does come in with stress, they’re able to say “we don’t want you out on the road if you’re feeling like that”. They’re working to such tight deadlines and thin margins, the employer probably feels like they can’t do that anyway, and they don’t actually want to know about the driver’s stress because it causes them too much disruption with trying to make other arrangements for deliveries.

So any thoughts on how employers can make that decision a little bit easier for them, or not put them in such a difficult situation?

Lisa: Well, there are strong individual differences in how people respond to stress, and that’s well known. It’s essentially about how you appraise the stressful situation, and retraining the thought processes around that is essential if you’re going to get people to be a bit more hardy. But from a management perspective, as I say, the best thing really is for everybody to have some form of stress management training, because it’s not going to do anyone any harm. It’s going to do an awful lot of good especially for certain people.

We know that there’s a subset of the workforce that are much more likely to be involved in crashes than others. And it could be that just by changing the way that they approach the problem of the demand on them as a driver, it could actually make all the difference. And also help drivers to talk about some of the things that are going on in their own lives. And how that can be resolved. Sometimes, just talking about it is very helpful.

Simon: Yeah, I want to ask you a final question, which is possible a little bit linked to what you said you were working on at the moment with Cranfield, looking into driver behaviour linked to autonomous vehicles and all of that. I know that’s some way in the future, but, in the intervening period we’ve got increasing levels of active drive safety technology, we’ve got various bits of technology on electric vehicles, obviously there’s an increasing number of electric vans on the road. And many of them have got a lot of this safety technology on there. Are there any considerations for driver managers about how those drivers adapt to all this new technology and the new driving style needed for an electric van – it’s obviously got different driving characteristics. Are there any things driver managers need to be aware of from a training… or how the driver feels comfortable with that technology?

Lisa: Well, yes, I think there’s an awful lot more that needs to be considered here, because in my experience… employers will often procure vehicles because the manufacturer is trying to sell the latest spec, but actually it’s a question of how people respond to that technology. And there’s an awful lot of evidence coming through around how reaction times might change, or behaviour might adapt in such a way that actually the safety benefits that they claim can’t be found. We’re currently looking at some of the claims that manufacturers are making about things like ESC or AC, adaptive cruise control. And we are seeing that these crashes that they’re supposed to be saving, is not actually possible really, because every system is claiming to reduce crashes by 50% and if that was the case we’d be having minus thousands of crashes every year.

Simon: Yeah, there’s a lot of work to do on that, making sure people understand the technology. The vast majority of drivers I’ve talked to don’t know what half of this technology is or does. So a lot of education still needs to be done on that.

Lisa, thank you so much for sharing your insight with us. Where can people go to find out more about you and your work?

Lisa: PsyDriveGroup.co.uk

Simon: Fantastic, okay, we’ll put a link to that in the show notes for this episode. Thanks very much, really appreciate your time.

Lisa: You too, thanks very much.

***********************

(transition)

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to

those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful

resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to

access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don’t forget to hit subscribe - so you

know when the next episode is released. And please also give us a 5-star review, as

this helps us to get up the podcast rankings, and makes it more visible to others who

might also find it useful. You can follow us – that’s Driving for Better Business on

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And most importantly, please help us to spread the

word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets and their employees

who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward

to welcoming you to the next episode.

This month, we’ve published a revised risk management case study for WJ Group – one of the UK’s leading road safety and highway maintenance businesses. With over 650 employees and a fleet of more than 400 vehicles, driver wellbeing is a big focus for WJ.

My guest today in WJ Goup’s Sustainability Director Paul Aldridge, and we’re going to talk about how WJ Group mitigates the effects of what is a physically and mentally demanding job role, on it’s staff. Especially those who also drive the company vehicles.

Paul Aldridge, WJ Group Sustainability Director

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/what-if-your-drivers-jobs-were-good-for-them

Paul Aldridge, WJ Group Sustainability Director https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-aldridge-072608109/

WJ Group https://www.wj.uk/

Driver Fitness – what if your drivers’ jobs were good for them? https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/articles/driver-fitness-what-if-your-drivers-jobs-were-good-for-them/

Simon: Welcome to the February episode of ‘Let’s Talk Fleet Risk’

In the first quarter of this year, the Driving for Better Business campaign is taking a deeper look at the area of fitness to drive and driver wellbeing.

This month, we’ve published a revised risk management case study for WJ Group – one of the UK’s leading road safety and highway maintenance businesses. With over 650 employees and a fleet of more than 400 vehicles, driver wellbeing is a big focus for WJ.

My guest today in WJ Goup’s Sustainability Director Paul Aldridge, and we’re going to talk about how WJ Group mitigates the effects of what is a physically and mentally demanding job role, on its staff. Especially those who also drive the company vehicles.

Paul – Welcome to the podcast.

My first question is obviously why wellbeing is so important to WJ? As a company, WJ seems to go further than most employers, so perhaps you could tell us about the challenges your staff and drivers face as part of their jobs, and what drives this commitment to their wellbeing?

Paul: Sure. Wellbeing is critical to most businesses, I believe. It’s about looking after the whole person, so we’ve got health and safety and wellbeing, and they fit into this group – it’s better for the company – better for productivity – and better for the people that work for us. What could be wrong with that?

Our people face a lot of hazards – we’re working in the middle of the roads putting lines down, and working with hot materials is one of our principal activities so it’s fundamental to what we do.  The obvious hazards are materials and the vehicular activity so it’s providing a safe space – that’s important . Over the last few years for everyone working in the public realm there seems to be increasing abuse that people have to face. It seems strange to me that somebody feels they have the right to shout and swear at the people that work for us. They’d feel weird if we walked into their offices and did it to them, but they feel they have the right to do it to our workers – it’s not good for general wellbeing. There are also wider problems – air pollution is a real big problem for us as a society and by the nature of our work we contribute to it. There’s the physical risk – muscular skeletal risk, and as I say, the hazards of working with hot materials. Some years ago we started looking at this and we looked at the idea of stealing the title from our work with Business in the community – what if your job was good for you? We divided wellbeing onto several pillars – physical wellbeing, mental wellbeing, financial wellbeing and social wellbeing and it all fits together in trying to provide a holistic wellbeing for our people.

Simon: I think that’s really important. I like the idea of the pillars, So, if we drill down into the physical one to start with – tell us about the impact of poor fitness and what you do to help them.

Paul: A lot of the work we do – and we can’t forget those who don’t work on the roads – it’s a physically demanding job – but there’s lots of manual handling problems. Do they lift properly? We have added issues around the heat of the materials. There’s a lot of driving – sitting in a driver’s seat – so designing things as ergonomically the best it can be. We design equipment fundamentally for safety but also so its easy to use. So there’s splashguards in place, height protection for the back of a vehicle. Interlocks so moving parts don’t get in the way. We ask our people to contribute to the design of the vehicles they use. We have an SOS system – safety automation – so people can communicate with the safety and design team on improvements they can see on the vehicles or their working environment to reduce risks. It helps them better able to do their job.

Simon: It’s ot physical strength is it – they’re out on the roads all day – difficult to maintain reasonable diet, stay hydrated that kind of thing?

Paul: It’s a really good point. I think, we didn’t think about these things back in the day. We tended to live on the food in the local garage – and there’s a lot of night work so it’s hard to maintain a good diet – but we try to give advice. In our driver’s handbook we have a section on nutrition. We do work on occupational health – the employees have medicals – people from 21 to 60 have a medical every 3 years and if you’re over 60 you have it annually. If you have a medical need we review it annually and part of the process is the nurse talks to people about their diet and it helps pick up any problems with health early. We do regular eyesight checks every 6 months. Everyone who drives a company vehicle has one. We had lots of people starting to wear glasses – it helps pick up residual problems like cataracts – it’s good for your life beyond work. I believe it should extend ito their whole wellness.

Simon: You obviously take this approach with all your operational staff but some of those are going to have to drive your vehicles between jobs and then back again at the end of a gruelling shift. You mentioned earlier some is carried out overnight. How do you deal with things like fatigue and ensure they’re still able to concentrate and do that safely?

Paul:  Fatigue is a big risk for us and others in our industry so we have a fatigue policy which is regularly updated. We have a set of rules about rest – planning it properly and not too many shifts consecutively so there’s time for rest. Sometimes shift run over, and people end having to stay on site due to other circumstances, something further down the cycle so if people work a longer shift we have to have something in place so they aren’t going to work the following night – and that is a really important part of what we do. It’s vital we understand fatigue and mitigate the risks.

Simon: So let’s talk about mental health now – we’ve done some work with the suicide prevention charity CALM so we know 75% of all suicides are male – which means that every 2 hours, somewhere in the UK, a man takes his own life. I imagine most of your operatives are male and I know you take this very seriously so talk us through how you support staff on mental health.

Paul: Unfortunately we have lost colleagues who have taken their own lives. Its terrible for all involved – so desperately sad. Many years ago under the auspices of our Safety Director, Craig Williams, we set up a mental health first aid group. That came out of those tragedies. Craig made it his mission and we set up a strong group of mental health first aiders across the company. We began to see other things happening that people were doing in the industry. A few years ago we engaged the services of a mental health counsellor. The results have been remarkable. We do a staff survey averey 18 months and we collect information about disability. The survey results were astonishing – we have 14% of employees declaring a disability – on the face of it it’s potentially worrying but actually it reflects the national statistics and it made us proud of the work we have done.

In 2021 our counsellor conducted 227 sessions – wellbeing checks, management support meetings – teaching managers how to deal with mental health of colleagues, 38 crisis risk assessments with 71 additional meetings and that wasn’t  because it was a bad place to work – I think the numbers reflect what life is like for people in society in general.

We ‘are really pleased we’ve been able to offer that support. We do red flag training – it’s about getting our staff onto this course – and some people don’t want to do it an d that’s fine – but those who do are taught to look after colleagues and learn about the red flags. A chat often helps. It takes the stigma out of mental health and wellbeing. We all suffer with doubts and mental health problems from time to time and having that time and to see it as normal – going back to the statistics about men being very vulnerable in this area, the more we can do to overcome the stigma, the better off we will all be,

Simon: That sounds like an excellent programme. It works both ways, doesn’t it? Not only picking up on others with problems but identifying issues you may have yourself?

Paul: I think the figures I went through actually reflect that. People have reached out about things and were we not doing this they may not have had anywhere to go. As an organisation we are pleased we have done this. We all have those moments of doubts and most manage but if we’ve helped people struggling to recognise it’s not something they should cover up – we help them manage and they can help themselves to manage.

Simon: And, of course, stress and pressure don’t just come from the job itself, they come from outside in their personal life as well, in the employee’s personal life. How do you support on that?

Paul: Yes – that’s the whole point of the wellbeing programme. There’s the physical and mental side – there’s the financial side with the cost of living crisis- we know people are struggling across society. I was in a meeting earlier, a business community meeting, talking about hygiene poverty. Which has an effect on working life – some employees couldn’t afford to keep themselves clean so they are skipping work.

If you’re driving down the road and your head is full of worries about bills, how are you concentrating on driving and will you spot that person who steps in front of you – the pedestrian or the cyclist, the horse rider – financial worries have an effect and they are a problem. We have provided access to financial advisers for our employees so if they catch things earlier it’s easier to mitigate. We also provide schemes for discounts and vouchers – money off shopping and spectrum health – little things that help.

.

Simon: It also helps in making your staff feel valued – that you put all that effort into supporting them. You sit on the Committee for Fairness, Inclusion and Respect in Construction so you’re obviously personally passionate about these issues. Tell me a little about your work with the committee and something that I believe you call ‘Social Wellbeing’

Paul: It was set up a while ago – 2013 – CICA, the CITB and the Supply Chain Sustainability School. It’s about making the industry better for everybody. Better for business – about treating everyone fairly and including everyone with respect. It’s about treating people with equity and compassion and discouraging inappropriate behaviour like bullying and increasing the diversity of our work force.

Construction is a male dominated industry – providing opportunities for women, ror people across different backgrounds, for people with disabilities., The statistics tell us that the more diverse a company and its culture, the better performing that organisation is. I’m on the steering committee and it provides materials to help people look at the business case for inclusion. Going back to wellbeing it’s making work more inclusive. You can’t run a safe site if everyone is not included,. It uses simple language. People shy away from ED and I – equality and diversity inclusion – because they are worried about being predominately a white male industry. What this message is – we need to improve but we are where we are so it’s about measuring our statistics and helping us to help ourselves. We have a skills shortage – we need to attract people form every walk of life. The social mobility does encourage people – the opportunity is out there. It takes us into schools – we won an inspiring change award for that work – we do product talks, road safety campaigns for schools and it takes you into places you would never have thought you could go to – but you are putting something back into society.

Simon: Final question Paul as we start to wrap up. We’ve just published your updated case study and WJ is well known in the highways industry for its commitment to safety management in all areas of the business, and I know you view driver safety and wellbeing as just another area of employee safety that needs to be managed to the same high standards.

The case study showed that over a period of 15 months you reduced collisions by 40% and associated costs by 45% plus significant reductions in fuel use and emissions. And that’s on top of equally impressive reductions from your previous case study. It really speaks to how healthy and safe staff help drive the business to new highs for performance and efficiency, and that genuine long-term commitment from those at the top of the business drives continuous improvement, doesn’t it? How important is that commitment at the top?

Paul: Absolutely vital – making employees feel valued. They are fairly paid – it’s that interaction between the people. We should all be part of one team. It’s about designing our jobs better with wellbeing in mind and that is got to be your first priority as a manager. Our driver behaviour scheme has worked incredibly well for us. It’s based on a carrot not a stick – based on telematics. The reductions you quote came out of that. Every month at each of our depots there’s a £100 prize for the best driver and also £50 – for the most improved – I think in my own mind that’s the good prize.

And a £1000 prize at the end of the year for the best driver. The savings that have been made pay for the prizes many times over. It’s about trying to look after people as a whole. Safety doesn’t stop at the site boundary – and wellbeing certainly doesn’t

Simon: I think that it’s clearly testament to the results you’ve seen – it’s clearly working for you. Thank you so much for being our guest today and for your continued support of Driving for Better Business. I’d like to applaud you for everything you’re doing on this vital subject of wellbeing. I think that you’re making your staff and drivers feel extremely valued.

We’ve published your revised case study on our website and also a feature on the work you’re doing on wellbeing and some of the things we’ve discussed today. We’ll put details and links in the show notes.

***********************

(transition)

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to

those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful

resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to

access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don’t forget to hit subscribe – so you

know when the next episode is released. And please also give us a 5-star review, as

this helps us to get up the podcast rankings, and makes it more visible to others who

might also find it useful. You can follow us – that’s Driving for Better Business on

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And most importantly, please help us to spread the

word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets and their employees

who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward

to welcoming you to the next episode.

In this episode we’re going to look at drug-driving at work and I’m joined by two guests:

We have Ean Lewin, who is the Managing Director of Dtec International. Dtec supports hundreds of fleet operators on policy, screening and testing for drink and drugs. They also supply all 43 British police forces with the DrugWipe roadside testing kits.

And we have Lesley O’Brien, who is the Managing Director of Freightlink Europe, a haulage firm based in Halifax, West Yorkshire, and one of Dtec’s corporate clients. Lesley was awarded an OBE in 2020 for her work in the transport industry and is going to talk to us about her personal experience of implementing screening and testing within her own firm.

Ean Lewin, DTec International and Lesley O’Brien, Freightlink Europe

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/who-is-drug-driving-in-your-organisation/

LinkedIn - Ean Lewin, Managing Director of D.tec International https://www.linkedin.com/in/ean-lewin-44110617/

D.tec International https://www.dtecinternational.com/

LinkedIn - Lesley O Brien, Managing Director of Freightlink Europe https://www.linkedin.com/in/lesleyobrien2010/

Freightlink Europe https://www.freightlinkeurope.co.uk/

PDF - The Hidden Cost of Substance Abuse in the Workplace Download PDF

PDF - Lose your FLT licence, Lose your livelihood Download PDF

PDF - Effects of Stimulants on the Body Download PDF

PDF - Effects of Depressants on the Body Download PDF

PDF - Effects of Alcohol on the Male Body Download PDF

PDF - Effects of Alcohol on the Female Body Download PDF

Simon: Welcome to first episode of ‘Let’s Talk Fleet Risk’ for 2023.

In the first quarter of this year, the Driving for Better Business campaign is taking a deeper look at the area of Fitness to Drive. We’ll be sharing content on driver impairment, fatigue and wellbeing.

In this episode we’re going to look at drug-driving at work and I’m joined by two guests:

We have Ean Lewin, who is the Managing Director of Dtec International. Dtec supports hundreds of fleet operators on policy, screening and testing for drink and drugs. They also supply all 43 British police forces with the DrugWipe roadside testing kits.

And we have Lesley O’Brien, who is the Managing Director of Freightlink Europe, a haulage firm based in Halifax, West Yorkshire, and one of Dtec’s corporate clients. Lesley was awarded an OBE in 2020 for her work in the transport industry and is going to talk to us about her personal experience of implementing screening and testing within her own firm.

Welcome to you both

Ean, perhaps I can start with you. Can you give us an idea of how prevalent drug driving is, and why employers should be concerned?

Ean: The basic message about prevalence of drug driving is that, it is more than drink driving and it’s just not analysed or detected enough and to back that up some recent figures released from Merseyside Police, covering the pre-Christmas drink / drug driving campaign – this time it was expanded to 6 weeks adding on a couple of weeks for the world cup, they made over 500 arrests in that 6 week period. 350 of those were drug drivers, 150 were drink drivers. That shows you the proportion and to bring this into context on the workplace - in 2020 their data showed that 50% of Merseyside police detections that year were either drivers at work in a company vehicle or they would be driving for their work the next day so 50% was shocking. That was repeated the year after – high 30%’s so it is very prevalent in work time and work vehicles.

Simon: Can you tell us a little about what drugs we should be concerned about, how common they are, and how long impairment can last?

Ean: In principle this is not medications, but illegal drugs. 80 – 85% of that is cannabis and then cocaine. Cocaine is very much more prevalent and in the workplace environment people use cocaine to stay awake. Cannabis is used then to calm down after shifts, and to take the edge of the cocaine they’re taking. There is a third one which I’ll go back to medication – the third thing we see from our corporate clients is codeine. Yes, it’s a medication but it’s the most abused medication on the planet. Rather than using it for a few days, people start using it permanently and getting addicted to it and increase the amount they’re on. All 3 of those drugs impair you in different ways. The cannabis will slow your brain down, your body clock, you react much slower if something is happening in front of you – do you slow down in time? Do you take avoidance action or not? Cocaine is speeding you up and you’re more likely to take risks and you are more likely to think you can achieve an overtake or you can dive through a gap and all the time increasing the likelihood of an incident.

Simon: If these drugs are being take socially in their own time – some of these effects can last a long time, can’t they?

Ean: Yes, your body reacts in similar ways to drugs as to drink – some of those reactions are like alcohol, like a hangover. So, you say I’ll have a hair of the dog and have more. Whether you deem that full blown addiction or dependence it’s definitely multiple use so it’s rare that personal private time use is ever able to be separated from when people are at work and of course in this environment we’re discussing we are talking about transit vans doing 70 mph plus on a motorway or 40 tonnes of HGV - there’s a lot of implications to that greying of taking drugs in personal time.

Simon: The driver if he or she is caught with drug driving, that’s basically their licence gone. How much responsibility does an employer have?

Ean: The road traffic act 1988 is clear – if you are caught drug driving or drink driving then there is a minimum ban of 12 months. That’s the responsibility of the driver. That then would impinge on any other additions to their licence and what the traffic commissioner would say – they would have an opinion on the company.

As far as the company we’re looking at The Health and Safety at Work Act, several other bits of legislation but in the worst case when there is a death, we are talking about the Corporate Manslaughter Act and the company would definitely be complicit. The judge would be looing at who was involved and how much effort the company had made to put prevention steps in place, if they hadn’t, then individuals in the company would then be considered complicit and they would be prosecuted and personally fined. Not the company cheque book. The traffic manager or the directors would potentially go to jail and be selling their house to pay the fines.

Simon: Clearly no employer wants to be in that position. Lesley, could you tell us what made you decide to start screening and testing your drivers?

Lesley: 2 or 3 years ago I was at a meeting with the DVSA and trade bodies and the focus was on vehicle safety and maintenance. Someone, a small operator, said the real problem impacting on safety on our roads is drivers under the influence of drugs or alcohol and the lady recounted a story whereby all of her small fleet was occupied on one contract and the contractor insisted on drugs and alcohol testing and overnight over 50% were found to be positive and that impacted on her being able to service that contract and she lost half of her drivers overnight.

At the same meeting a large operator echoed those statistics and I thought, my goodness, this is frightening. We all think we know our drivers and we would know. and there’re all nice people and it couldn’t happen to us but clearly that was something that made me start thinking that I need to be doing something about this. I need to be testing not only my drivers but office workers who were driving, and have a total culture of wanting to be drugs and alcohol free so that’s when I started on the journey. Looking at the variety of providers out there and of course there are a lot of providers, you have a choice. For me I finally went with DTec not because they were the cheapest but that they were providing the police, so I presumed that the police had done their due diligence, but I also wanted a system that was legally defensible in court. There’s no point doing this if you find someone who is impaired, and you can’t carry on to take action that can be backed up.

Simon: If testing isn’t something you’ve done before, I guess your primary concern would be how are your drivers going to react? How did you get driver engagement?

Lesley: Like a lot of companies, we actually had a drug and alcohol policy and that was given at the time of employment as part of the driver’s contract. We were giving fitness to drive questionnaires which included – can we do drug and alcohol testing? So, we had it in place, but we weren’t doing anything. The first step was to hold a drivers meeting and we told them what we were going to do and why we were doing it, and we were going to give them a month’s grace. They had a month to clean themselves up or come and speak to us for help – and we had 2 resignations.

One of them, I don’t know why that person resigned, he didn’t say. The other one was clear – they had a drugs problem, and they would be found positive and that was a real eye opener because had you asked me to choose a driver that I thought could have a problem, I would never have chosen this driver. The message for people out there is, you think you know your teams, it will be the least likely.

Because we had spoken to the drivers and because we had systems in place, we did review our policy and tighten it up - we didn’t have much kick back from the team. I think, as always, it’s down to communication.

Simon: Absolutely. Ean, Lesley has obviously put a lot of effort into getting this right and she values the support from your team at Dtec.

I see many companies that have a driving for work policy which explicitly forbids drink or drug driving, exactly as Lesley said she had, but they don’t do any testing. However, I also encounter many companies that don’t even have a policy. What does good practice look like in this area?

Ean: I suppose Freightlink is the perfect client – we tend to hope we are seen as a partner rather than a customer / supplier relationship. We make ourselves available to help in any way. Lesley asked for advice and help - and then listened. So, they looked at how it would fit in to their organisation and implemented a clear process. Definition of clear? Clear to the employees. They understand what the rules are. That’s the main thing. I see so many policies that are 30 or 40 pages of stuff and employees don’t read that. I also see policies that might be 6 pages and it very clearly gets across that whether you call it zero tolerance or whatever, drugs and alcohol will not be tolerated in this organisation or on this site. The way we see good practice – and it’s taken us 27 or 28 years now to get this clear – we have policy. We have education, we have a deterrent and then we have detection.

We’ve just discussed getting the policy clear for the employee to understand. Getting education out there so they understand why they shouldn’t be doing it, and what to do if there are questions – who to ask. We then have the deterrent which I look at as the carrot and stick. We will dangle the carrot but make no bones about it it’s on the end of a big stick.

We then detect – everybody thinks it’s all about the detection – that’s when the drug wipe comes into its fore. As Lesley said it’s police standard specification around the world – not just the UK – and yes we then detect in a screening stage that there is a non-negative and from that we would then go into a legally defensible confirmation process.

The issue is if we detect too many times, then we either have the policy wrong or insufficient education or deterrent. This is where the partnership comes – we need to know what a companies’ results are so we can work through those and check whether we need to modify something. As Lesley said – they modified their policy at various points because they realised that something needs to be clearer – this needs to be absolute, this needs more flexibility. That’s what ‘good’ looks like – good is doing something and not just having a piece of paper that you think you can rely on. You need to be screening. Nowadays with the level of drugs out there you need to be making sure that you are looking and that the employees know you’re looking. Then anybody that is taking drugs, you say, not on my watch and not in my company.

Simon: You mentioned education in that response and presumably educating drivers is essential to get them onside, and to understand why the company’s policy is necessary. What are the important points to get across to drivers?

Ean: If you talk to anyone who is smoking cannabis, they will always defend it to the hilt. I’m not saying anything about your personal use of cannabis - but it does not mix with driving – with driving your personal car, your family in the car, it doesn’t mix with a transit van, with a bus, with an HGV. It simply does not.

You wouldn’t be taking it, paying good money for it if it didn’t have an effect on you – and those effects are seen in your ability to drive to standard that is required in law – so education has got to be a little bit of explanation, toolbox talks, things we can help with. The team at Dtec – we can put together a 5-minute discussion for example.

I am in the office sat in front of 4 coasters that we did with BRAKE the road safety charity, and it’s all about education, and that is – you get it wrong, and you lose your licence, you probably lose your livelihood which has implications on your mortgage and everything else. It’s the education that is simply it doesn’t mix with this role – with these jobs.

Simon: There’s obviously investment required in testing and screening – presumably you could recoup in other areas if it improves driver safety?

Ean: Absolutely. Just taking a cold hard look and putting it in numbers – if you had a vehicle that was involved in an incident – whether it’s a write-off and driver in hospital, or something, you’ve lost that vehicle and that driver for a good period of time which might impinge on a contract. It just adds to your complications and all of that is calculatable – you can add that up. On the other hand, It it might be something as simple as someone has taken a mirror off a bus – and that means the vehicle has to come in, the vehicle is grounded, they have to send another vehicle to do that service, they are then having to get the replacement wing mirror fitted - so you’ve got technician time. Then you have the discussion with the driver as to why it happened- the management discussions going on. Was this an incident and why did it happen – all of this takes time and money. It’s costing you in hard cash for components, in overheads and it’s not very long before you realise working with Dtec or any other supplier might have removed that and all of the unexpected incidents and lack of judgement. Maybe there’s a reason for it and you should iron it out of your company. Customers stay with us because they realise that it’s a financial benefit. Then you have, as Lesley pointed out, the social consequences and whether you as a director can sleep at night thinking you’re doing the right thing or whether you are burying your head in the sand hiding behind a paper policy.

Simon: Lesley, as we wrap up this conversation, I wonder what your personal experience has been after you actually began the screening process? How have the drivers responded? What did you learn from the process? And ultimately, has it given you the confidence as an employer and as a fleet operator that you were looking for?

Lesley: At Freightlink we’ve really developed a culture of safety and zero tolerance of drugs and alcohol, and this culture has impacted how everybody works. Despite that, despite everything you do, despite new employees knowing that before they even take a vehicle out there going to be drugs and alcohol tested, there will be random tests throughout the year, there will be recalls if they have had an incident or we think there’s a reason to test – with all that you wouid think you’d drive it all out.

But sadly, before Christmas we had a non-negative, a positive test for an employee who was impaired and I’ll reiterate, it’ s the one you think you will not have a problem with. It is heart wrenching just before Christmas to find that you have someone who is possibly going to cause an incident on the road, possibly injure someone, probably injure themselves, probably write off my vehicle and it’s a bad time of year but that person has to go. Having these systems policies and procedures in place - they actually make that dismissal for gross misconduct far easier because that person knows you have everything in place and before you start saying we’re calling in that external body in to do a urine test, they actually walk, and in the policy, walking is an admission that you are impaired - so it’s helped in our culture that people don’t even come to us if they are using drugs or have a problem.

Even then you can and will have an issue and it’s really important that you keep reiterating the message – we are not experts, we have talked to Ean about education. We have all of our Dtec posters up but if someone came to us, we could call upon the experts and in my mind, I think it should be a legal obligation that if you are employing people who are operating machinery or driving on the road, they should be tested – and then maybe we could reduce these statistics that Ean has spoken about and make our roads safer.

Simon: That’s a salutary lesson and a point to reinforce – even with your commitment to this over the last 3 years and the awareness among your drivers, you still had that non-negative test, and it was from someone you would not have expected - that really shows to everyone this isn’t something you can take lightly. Everybody needs some kind of testing policy in place. Thanks for sharing that.

Thank you both so much for joining me for this discussion. We’ll put details of both your companies in the show notes and also links to some free resources from Dtec to help you get started with understanding the key issues and how to review your own policies and procedures.

And thank you for listening

*********************** (transition)

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don’t forget to hit subscribe - so you know when the next episode is released. And please also give us a 5-star review, as this helps us to get up the podcast rankings, and makes it more visible to others who might also find it useful. You can follow us – that’s Driving for Better Business on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And most importantly, please help us to spread the word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets and their employees who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode.

My guest for this episode of the Let's Talk Fleet Risk podcast is Richard Parker, Corporate Sales Manager at Webfleet – part of Bridgestone Mobility Solutions.

Webfleet is a leader in helping fleets understand the management processes that are needed to ensure safe and efficient operation of EV fleets so Richard and I are going to get into the key issues that fleet and driver safety managers need to be looking at.

Richard Parker, Corporate Sales Manager, Webfleet

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/transitioning-to-evs-start-now/

Richard Parker - LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardjparker1/

Webfleet https://www.webfleet.com/en_gb/webfleet/

Webfleet Video raises the bar on fleet safety standards Download PDF

An electrifying journey: A step-by-step fleet guide to making the electric van transition. Download PDF

Dispelling the myths: Six common misconceptions about video telematics Download PDF

[su_row][su_column size="1/2" center="no" class=""][su_youtube url="https://youtu.be/r8p4BHArpXk"][/su_column][su_column size="1/2" center="no" class=""][su_youtube url="https://youtu.be/vAeWWGGdA1o"][/su_column][/su_row]

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk - a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation. 

With the rapid transition that many fleets are making to electric vehicles, I've been interested for some time in how that affects risk management for these fleets. The vehicles are more powerful, have some unique driving characteristics and have different maintenance requirements. Plus, there's recharging, load carrying and driver training to think about.

My guest for this episode of the Let's Talk Fleet Risk podcast is Richard Parker, Corporate Sales Manager at Webfleet – part of Bridgestone Mobility Solutions.

Webfleet is a leader in helping fleets understand the management processes that are needed to ensure safe and efficient operation of EV fleets, so Richard and I are going to get into the key issues that fleet and driver safety managers need to be looking at.

Hi Richard and welcome to the podcast.

Simon: I'm not an expert in electric vehicles but I've driven a few and there are obviously areas of their operation that are significantly different to operating conventional petrol or diesel vehicles. Where do you think the key challenges in risk management lie.

Richard: Let’s start from the very top which is Central Government legislation and remind everyone on some of the timelines – 

From 2030 – there’ll be no more diesel or petrol vehicles sold, that doesn’t mean there be zero tailpipe emissions, plug in hybrids will still be able to be sold until 2035. 

2035 – this is the cut off date for 26 tonne HGVs, and 2040 for the 44 tonnes and below down to 26, so we’ve really got 16 years before we will no longer have new petrol and diesel vehicles on sale. It’s also worth considering that sitting underneath that is a number of other things that will potentially give businesses some risks that need to be managed. Things like Local Authority changes, with zero emissions, clean air and ULEZ zones. There is financial reporting changes that are coming that will require many of your audience to report on their carbon footprint as part of the supply chains and contracts they hold. That’s here and now and building quickly. Finally the other one is that we are all consumers ourselves and I think  that especially after the last few years, weather, and things we see, our awareness of the need to change what we do to protect our climate is that much more visible. As consumers we all look to deal with more businesses that are genuinely looking at their sustainability and how they do business. I think we will take that into our business-to-business conversations and expect organisations we work with to be leading on decarbonising their operations. So that’s the big picture – when I look at an individual business, I think it’s quite easy to split it into 3 key areas of risk. 

First one is Operational, second one is financial and the third one, and the most important to me, is the driver. I know we are going to talk in more detail about each of these, as these are the 3 key areas when I’m talking to customers about transitioning and de-risking the change to zero emission tail pipe vehicles.

Simon: So, if we look at those in turn, let's start with operational risk. The capabilities of EV's are different when comes to things like range and load capacity, etc. How should businesses be assessing operational requirements and vehicle capabilities 

Richard: Well, in some ways, the fact that you can’t get vehicles very easily at the moment, especially commercial vehicles, there are real challenges in the supply chains, is also a really good opportunity to plan. When we look at operational and planning, tomorrow’s vehicle is not going to do the same job s today’s vehicle. For businesses, that operational view needs to be - what does the vehicle actually do for for our business? Does it need to do in the same way tomorrow? Organisations are looking at total use of the vehicle in a different way. Previously, going from a large panel van where it was a daily trip to collect stock, to now in a much smaller EV van, and stock is delivered directly to site. 

So they’re looking at the operational model and planning how they do it differently. Historically when I worked in the fleet sector, we talked about averages – so the fleet did a average 25,000 miles a year, the average payload was X and actually in this transitioning – it is a transition – not every vehicle has to go tomorrow to a zero tailpipe emission vehicle, but it is about looking at each individual vehicle. Where does it go? How often does it go, how long does it stop there – is that long enough for charging? What loads are we carrying and what impact does that have on the range of the vehicle? If you look at the weather at the moment, in Scotland, it’s minus 11 and the impact on the range of those EVs is significant so operationally planning for that annual cycle is really key. I guess that comes from data and if you’re going to look at things on a vehicle-by-vehicle basis you have to have the right set of data.

Simon: Most of the medium and large fleets are well on their way to a full transition to EVs – you recapped the dates and a number of fleets I have spoken to have transitions planned to be completed in the ext 2-3 years - but many smaller businesses often don't seem to realise the amount of change required by a move to EVs. You mentioned governance changes and things like that - It's getting quite urgent, isn't it?

Richard: It is getting urgent. The ULEZ Zones and particularly, it might not mean much to listeners, but please research what Scope 3 Emissions look like. A number of larger organisations are going to be required to report their climate position in terms of carbon footprint and also their activities to reduce it and if you’re in their supply chain you may well be required to deliver some of those activities. Anecdotally I did hear a story this week that there is a school and if you’re a provider to it, at then next round of contract supply you will have to deliver in an electric vehicle so there are things that are happening beyond central government that may require your business to change things now. 

I would also say for smaller businesses, it’s the larger businesses we tend to see in social media and covered in the news, and we must not forget that they employ very specific resource to help them through this – whether its ESG managers, sustainability managers or their fleet manager has a specific role in transitioning to zero tail pipe emissions fleet. For smaller businesses, that’s so much harder – the people in the business that have that expertise – I would encourage if you’re starting to look at this don’t be afraid to buy in resource to help you do it. 

Some expertise – there are plenty of really good EV consultants out there to help you understand all the parts that are needed to successfully transition. That will be things like energy, where’s it coming from, can you substitute some of that power requirement with solar panels on your roof? How much charging infrastructure do you need? And that’s before Driver Training and what vehicles - that’s a lot to undertake for a business that potentially hasn’t got an internal resource. Don’t’ be afraid to go and procure some of that expertise because it will save you the mistakes other people have made. 

Simon: As you say not having that expertise on hand could exclude you from future work 

Richard: Yes, start now. If you have to dig up the pavement on your premises to get charging infrastructure in and perhaps even have an increase of power, not only are you talking about a substantial capital investment of hundreds of thousands of pounds, but if you get in wrong - it has to last you, be future proofed, so that takes time and also if you go to the distribution network operators and ask for your pavement to be dug up, you are already looking at several years lead time before that can happen, so waiting until 2027 and pushing then will probably mean that you miss a number of deadlines and cannot achieve the objectives of legislation or of the contracts that will keep your business running.

Simon: That’s a massive business risk. If we move onto financial risk, the operational cost of purchasing, leasing and your headline on-the-road costs are far higher than conventional ICE vehicles so what are the considerations here?

Richard: Going straight to the heart of it – the only way to truly assess the financial viability for an electric vehicle is through a modelling of total cost of ownership modelling. In my 20 years of leasing previously, a number of businesses still assessed the financial side of their vehicles based on the rental or lease cost including VAT, disallowable VAT - very simple calculations often. As you point out, the purchase prices of EVs are still substantially higher than a traditional petrol or diesel vehicle. However, whether you put them in to your modelling or not, there are a number of elements that will always cost a business money. It doesn’t change under an electric vehicle, but the cost ratios do change between ICE and EVs - so you must also include fuel or energy, service, maintenance and repair because we are finding that the service and maintenance on an EV are running at 40% less than that of an ICE vehicle. I will caveat that potentially the vehicle off road times for EVs are slightly longer, about 2days for a service instead of a day - in purely financial terms it is less. Energy – is less still through depot charging and it’s more fluid than 12 months ago but certainly with home and depot charging energy prices are still less than the pump price for diesel. Insurance needs to be built in – reclaimable VAT, any writing down allowances – a number of different elements that when you stack them all together bringing an electric vehicle on financial terms does make sense. It is cheaper than running an ICE vehicle, but you have to get passed that upfront cost piece and assess it on a total cost of ownership basis. 

The final one that you would build in is geographical relevance – don’t discount the costs of operating in London for example with a zero-emission vehicle vs an ICE vehicle and if you’re running something that’s not Euro 6 compliant that could be costing you £35 per day to go into London in an LCV. That soon adds up to a high annualised cost for an ICE vehicle.

Simon: When it comes to fuel use with a petrol or diesel vehicle we pretty much know where we are. If you put fuel in at your local station, it’s cheaper than a motorway services for example. Driving style and refuelling location can have an effect on overall fuel use and cost but there seem to be many more variables involves in recharging an electric vehicle? From my own experience there seems to be a difference between higher and lower limits on costs of recharging?

Richard: It’s quite a complex area. Let’s try and simplify it – the constituent parts for running a fleet haven’t fundamentally changed. You have got the purchase price and write down; you’ve got fuel costs – energy or petrol – those haven’t changed. While the measures look different, the principles behind it have not. There’s new terminology but you’re still looking at fuelling a vehicle. Suppose the big difference of course that we are now seeing which will affect the risk is when, where and how long it takes to charge. There are costs differences. Charging at home on a 7kW charger if you’ve got a 70kW vehicle you can look at 10 hours to charge that car. I’ll pay a domestic rate that makes it relatively cheap. If I am out on the road and I plug into a 50 or 150kW Charger, the rates are ranging from 48p up to 79 pence per kW hour. That becomes quite expensive for the fleet to run if that’s the way they’re doing it. It’s balanced between the rate of charge and the cost of charge so that needs to be factored in. 

The other side of that energy conversation, and it’s been no different with ICE is how the driver’s right foot affects the performance of that vehicle and you’ve mentioned it briefly, an EV has regenerative braking and for anybody out there who doesn’t know, the vehicle has a technological capability if you’re right foot behaves in a certain way the kinetic energy will be put back into recharging the battery, so you can get some additional efficiency from that vehicle. What we’re seeing in some of the customers we are working with, they are not quite getting that education piece right with the commercial vehicle driver.

A car driver, an EV Car driver, is still invested in understanding the technology that is underneath them and the fact that it is not a mechanical instrument – it’s a very different driving experience, but they’re investing in understanding that and getting the most out of it. 

With some of the commercial vehicle drivers, and this is the risk for the organisation, they don’t have that level of investment or ownership – of understanding what they’re driving. We see some right foot behaviours that damage that total cost of ownership model. It can also affect the operational model because if they don’t get the vehicle charged it cannot do it’s tasks for the day and that affects revenue for the organisation. It potentially has reputational risks if the driver can’t complete jobs as well, so it’s an interesting time of change for fleets, but again, coming back to one of our earlier bits on planning – planning what vehicles and how you’re going to run that fleet, how you’re going to have conversations with drivers, train  them before they get the keys to ensure that you are minimising the risk of change. 

Simon: So, we've got drivers using technology they're unfamiliar with and businesses getting to grips with new challenges for route planning, work scheduling, loading, etc. How much will the business operating environment impact on the driver? If they get that wrong it’s a lot of stress on the driver isn’t it?

Richard: Obviously the business can always put stress on a driver by asking them to do too many jobs in a day – we see that now ion ICE vehicles and we see that leads to the risks that Driving for Better Business try to eradicate – the speeding, the harsh driving events – a lot of these come as a result of a driver under duress. That won’t be any different in an EV. If the business doesn’t plan well for its daily requirements you will still force that into the equation. However, in the opposite sense, we are actually seeing that driver wellbeing and driver behaviours are improving in EVs. One of the reasons if that they are easier to drive. We think about some of the ways we have to operate at rush hour, in manual vehicles, clutch up and down in rush hour and how you get stressed. In an EV there’s none of that.It’s a nice environment you’re sitting in. These vehicles are new, the technology has made a massive difference to comfort and the driving position. There’s no clutch, so actually we are seeing albeit it’s anecdotal at the moment, less accidents in EVs than we do in ICE vehicles. I think the driving environment is a lot better.

Simon: So, there’s an improvement as long as they are not overworked.

Richard: It comes back to the business about understanding the job management and planning and being realistic about that. We’re really cogniscent – a lot of what is going on is really early stages in what is a huge and significant transformation of how we move goods and do business. For our part we are well down the track in the way we help businesses adopt practices for how many jobs a day they’re going to be able to do. Where are they going to charge these vehicles – private depot charging, public infrastructure charging and all those kinds of things. We’re under quite a drive ourselves to make sure we can support our customers as they transition. At the moment it’s fair to say that many businesses who are taking on electric vehicles are taking on the low hanging fruit. Which vehicles can easily do every day’s work with home to home or depot to depot charging infrastructure. We haven’t yet reached the challenge of understanding how a vehicle has no access to home or depot charging is going to fulfill its operational requirements. If that’s not easily achieved the stress does go onto the driver. Having to go and find a charge point and then finding out it doesn’t work and you have no range left could be hugely stressful, putting them off everything that’s good about driving an EV. The sort of things we do as an organization will be impactful as more and more EVs come on to fleets.

Simon: At Driving for Better Business, we are constantly telling fleets they’ve got to measure and monitor what they’re doing – data is a key part of that. Obviously with Web Fleet your business is around understanding and acting on the data that comes out of your systems. There's presumably a wealth of data available to operators from their EVs but much of it will be different data to what they're used to. It's going to be important to quickly get to grips with this new data, based on that total cost of ownership model, to set baselines to monitor it and take quick action where needed in order to optimise and improve fleet efficiency. How do they do that?

Richard: It’s really easy in this day and age to bamboozle people with huge amounts of data – we are trying to make that data provision insightful. We’ve already discussed the difference between medium large fleets and smaller fleets and that time resource pressure, so if people are time resource poor then they haven’t got time to go through reams of data to hopefully find something that will make a difference - so the first obligation is to get data to be insightful. 

Sometimes for us, we’ve stripped that down to a couple of lines of data, they can for example strip back in terms of driving risk – we are going to concentrate on speeding and idling times. The speeding is risk. Idling is financial. Those 2 elements are really easy for a whole business to get their head round what is going on that is providing risk financially and operationally to that fleet. They can message that down though the whole organisation down  to a driver level. It comes with an underlying message that the business is looking at what the driver is doing and they are going to manage that based on these criteria and as a result we find that the improvements happen in all the other areas – harsh braking, harsh steering, aggressive acceleration – all other driver behaviours that provide risk start to come down because you’ve simplified it and the drivers know they’re being managed. Going back to this EV conversation it’s no different. We look at where are they charging, for how long – boiling it down to simple metrics that allow them to have a conversation with the driver – so they can understand and make the changes that will improve the business. 

Actually, it can be a complex as you want it to be but if you want to affect change with people who are not yet as invested – like a van driver or someone who’s told they’re having something rather than choosing it, we need to simplify it.

Simon: Yes, I think there’s so much for fleet and driver managers to get their heads round to manage that transition effectively and to get the maximum benefit from a fleet of EVs. You made the point you need to start now…

Richard: Go and dip into lots of really good monthly webinars, it doesn’t take much of a search – just start drip-feeding that information into your organisation so you can start to understand some of the things that are going to be required in the not-to-distant future.

Simon: Richard, thanks for being our guest today and talking us through all the challenges

Richard: Thank-you Simon. Really appreciate it.

*********************** (transition)

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don’t forget to hit subscribe - so you know when the next episode is released. And please also give us a 5-star review, as this helps us to get up the podcast rankings, and makes it more visible to others who might also find it useful. You can follow us – that’s Driving for Better Business on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And most importantly, please help us to spread the word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets and their employees who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/does-your-organisation-know-the-true-cost-of-downtime-in-your-fleet

Case Study - Platform Housing Group https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/case-studies/business-champion/platform-housing-group/

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk - a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.

My guest today is Matt Neale who is Group Fleet Manager for Platform Housing. The group manages 47,000 social housing properties and Matt looks after a fleet of 500 LCVs to allow employed tradespeople to maintain these properties.

Matt - welcome to the podcast.

I wanted to get you on the show as we have just published a really great case study on the improvements you’re making at Platform Housing and the business benefits you’re seeing as well, and I wanted to dig a bit deeper into some of those. Can you just give us a brief summary of your role and your responsibilities?

Matt: I have been here since September 2021. I’ve worked in the industry for about 18 years. My responsibilities are the maintenance and repair of 500 commercial vehicles while also managing the driver’s downtime to support in the wider operation of the repairing of tenants’ properties. I also look after EV infostructure throughout the organisation, and driver training.

Simon: You’ve been at Platform Housing for just over a year now and I’ve got a two-part question to start with:

• How long did it take you to get to grips with the existing state of driver and vehicle management?
• And, what did you identify as the biggest challenges you were going to need to address?

Matt: To get to grips to start with it was quite easy. Being an experienced fleet manager, I was able to come in and know what I wanted to do. As part of my interview process I understood what the challenges were so I had an idea as to what I wanted to do. It didn’t take long to get to grips with that – I managed to get lots of stuff done in the first month actually, but throughout that first month I identified a plan as to what I saw as the bigger challenges moving forward.

We detailed about 20 different projects and the main one was that we had no system so every vehicle was managed off a spreadsheet - so that will be the driver allocation, the maintenance, the buying management, damage management end of contract, vehicle replacement programme – so that was my first challenge. I refused to manage a fleet off a spreadsheet bearing in mind the information was out of date as soon as you put the data into it.

Second biggest challenge was the management of our accidents – we had quite a high accident ratio in the organisation – I say accident ratio, it could be vehicle damage ratio – a prang or something - things like reversing into stationary object, however I didn’t like the idea of our insurance company managing their own work so we looked to introduce an accident management company to support us with that.

Simon: You’ve been working with partners such as Fleetcheck to implement fleet management software, FMG for accident management. How have you worked with them to get the data you need in a manageable format, and to be able to make good use of it?

Matt: So, Fleetcheck has allowed me to have a confidence in the data that I am managing. Because a lot of our workforce is hybrid working – since the pandemic, 90-95% of our workforce is hybrid. All my team work from home so it’s impossible to manage from a spreadsheet so implementing Fleetcheck allows us to work remotely while still having access to the same information. Fleetcheck is now my one version of the truth when it comes to anything to do with management of our systems. When we look to partner with others – FMG – we will go on to talk about Lightfoot later – but Fleetcheck has to integrate with them otherwise I don’t partner with them because I want one version of the truth as to where the data stems from,. I don’t want to create additional work for my team when updating vehicle allocations or driver allocations in the system so Fleetcheck has allowed me to have more of a detailed overview and I mentioned in my recommendation for them that they actually reduced my stress levels as a fleet manager so it’s definitely a worthwhile move for us to partner with Fleetcheck.

Simon: A key part of that is the ability to improve your vehicle checking & maintenance regime, isn’t it? What was that like when you came in and what does it look like now? Have there been significant improvements in that area?

Matt: Yes – Fleetcheck also allowed us to adapt the vehicle inspection profile – a driver app allows all our drivers to do a weekly vehicle inspection and it has a fall-out which means any defects that are reported come through to us and we can manage that maintenance a lot more pro-actively. Prior to having Fleetcheck the check data went into a group drive so somebody had to physically check every single PDF to see if there was a defect in there and then report it, so by implementing Fleetcheck we have saved half a day’s job for somebody, so it’s savings in other areas of the business and it’s allowed us to manage the vehicle and the safety of the driver as well, bearing in mind some of the defects maybe safety related.

Simon: Does that have an impact on any other incidents you see where mechanical faults with the vehicle were a problem. Have you seen any reduction in incidents related to that?

Matt: Yes definitely. Again, it’s important if they have a warning light on a vehicle it allows us to book the vehicle in proactively. If a vehicle has an amber warning light it allows us to get the vehicle straight into a dealer and we can arrange for a swap out of the vehicle which reduces the downtime of the operative. Leaving it often results in the vehicle breaking down and that can cause a knock-on effect and further damage to the vehicle which we can then become liable for. It also supports the downtime of the driver to get them back on the road a lot quicker through the effective management of doing these vehicle checks through Fleetcheck. Without it we were waiting for the vehicle to break down and being reactive which isn’t how an effective fleet manager should be working.

Simon: You’ve done a trial with Lightfoot to try and improve driver behaviour which yielded some fantastic results and projected annual savings of over £1m which should grab anybody’s interest. Can you tell us more about that?

Matt: It was something that the business openly adopted really – when Lightfoot approach you they come forward with some shocking proposals – shocking reductions, they say they can save you this, this and this. It almost sounds too good to be true – and you’re rather sceptical about it – but they do offer you a free trial, so we took the free trial and the figures – the data that came off the back off it, backed up their claims. The majority of our savings naturally came through fuel, with safer individual driving, allowing the fuel cost to be reduced dramatically. On average it saved us about £30 per vehicle per month on fuel. In addition to that, with the drivers driving a lot safer in the vehicle and not having so many harsh braking events or harsh cornering events or harsh acceleration events – it means that over the period of time – we set 5 years in our trial – it meant that we could save in other areas like accidental damage and in downtime which is really important. I would really urge all fleet managers to look at the true cost of downtime so the business can really understand it – it’s not just the vehicle and somebody’s hourly rate. It’s the fleet managers time, the fleet team’s time, and of course once you’ve driven the vehicle to the end of its lease you need to consider the end of lease charges that might result from abusing the vehicle over a number of years so by driving the vehicle in a safer, more safety efficient way it actually generates a considerable amount of savings. That’s how we got to the £1million saving over 5 years through those 4 main elements. In our first year it was about £180,000 and then it escalated over the next few years – but it’s not just financial. There are other benefits as well. As we are a charity, we receive grants from Homes in England to support our tenants in the social housing sector, we do have to offset our carbon footprint to meet ESG and CSR targets, so by going with Lightfoot, we not only make the fuel reduction but it will allow us to save 1.4 tonnes of carbon as well. It further supports the wider business, and the environment.

Simon: Yes, I think the environment and the downtime savings are two of the things at top of the list for most experienced fleet managers at the moment aren’t they – an experienced fleet manager understands how much time that unplanned mechanical failure, unplanned downtime can cost. So, to any new fleet managers its one of things they need to be managing isn’t it – the amount of downtime in the business.

Matt: Yes definitely – it doesn’t matter whether you manage a commercial fleet or a vehicle fleet – downtime is always going to be an issue. If someone is not able to perform the duty they are employed to do – in our line of business we deal with social housing and we have vulnerable tenants. If we can’t get out it has a knock-on effect – the tenants wellbeing - so the downtime of the vehicle and the driver is paramount. It plays a huge part in our organisation and that’s a consideration we take when we invest in products and partners. It’s all about improving the downtime of our operatives to improve our service to our tenants

Simon: Yes, I guess one of the benefits is an improvement customer service and that’s an important point.

One of the things we try to demonstrate with Driving for Better Business is that improvements, and therefore savings, can be made relatively quickly and start to pay back quicker than you might expect. Can you talk us through the returns you’ve seen versus the time and investment that have been made.

Matt: I am an experienced fleet manager but anyone joining the role or new to managing fleets – one of the main things – I have always been taught to save my salary so I become a benefit to the business. So that’s the first thing I do – I have a small team of 3, but I task them with generating savings as well. It’s simple things like challenging invoicing. Naturally in our organisation suppliers may have got away with more than they should while there wasn’t a fleet manager here, so we’ve generated £200K savings by challenging different costs with different suppliers. It works 2-fold – it makes you an asset to the business and not a cost burden, but also if you save money through challenging, you can say can we now look to invest other areas – like technology – it gives you a stronger case for board members. I’ve saved this but I’ve generated these savings – so that’s how I work when I am presenting proposals to the organisation – how I can generate savings. If I can save x amount of downtown hours for the operation – it has benefits to the business as a whole, it’s not just financially led.

Simon: When you first came into the business there hadn’t been a fleet manager - and you saw what needed addressing, what was the support like from senior management in the business? Could they see the benefits that were going to come or was that a difficult sell?

Matt: My boss is the Employment Director, and his direct line manager is the CFO. I couldn’t ask for 2 better people to be honest. The support I get is phenomenal. They always support what we are doing as a team. Fleet often gets left behind – I think that happens in lots of businesses – but by me raising areas of concern, showing where there are risks to the business, whether that be financial or reputational or in other areas, they fully support that and fully understand what I’m looking to achieve – and they go on to support me when I am presenting to the board for other investments so I’ve always had a positive experience.

I know some others don’t – all I would say to them is make sure you present the full facts and don’t just look at financial. Look at the operational benefits as well and look at your audience. I work for a Chief Financial Officer, so she’s very interested in the financial benefits. So that’s my audience and I’ll show where those financial benefits are. I also report to the Operations Director in my role and his main focus is the downtime of his drivers so I adapt the way I present to him so the benefits are not all around costs but how he is going to be able to improve aspects of the operation so our tenants have a more positive experience.

Simon: That’s a brilliant segue way into my next question. You mentioned at the start that you co-manage the workforce, alongside their direct line management, so how have you managed to work with other people in the business with different focus to balance the need to get the job done quickly, with the need to get to and from the job as safely as possible?

Matt: Yes definitely. The key thing when I first started and sat down with the senior leadership team and service managers, the thing I made clear, before they’re an engineer or an electrician or a plumber, or a multi-skilled tradesperson, they are a car driver or a van driver – they get in my vehicle before they become that tradesperson. It’s my job to get them to their location safely to complete the job they’ve been employed to do. I got a positive response to this as they often see vehicles being a necessary evil. I spun it around to say our job is to get you there safely. I regularly talk to the senior teams in property care and the service teams to support the downtime of the operatives to make sure they go about their business in a safe manner – that’s my job.

Simon: That’s something that Driving for Better Business supports – these guys are highly skilled and professional at their trade – and driving is a part of that so it’s about getting them to view driving with the same professionalism as they do their normal work.

Matt: Yes. You’re a driver first – I do Toolbox Talks and I jump on a ‘Your Voice’ forum so operatives can talk directly to me and raise concerns – it allows me to have one to one conversations and smaller group conversations to show them benefits – Lightfoot offers them initiatives directly – they reward them each month just for driving safely – so it’s important to communicate with the driver.

Simon: My final question for you, Matt. Every successful fleet manager I speak to says you can never rest on your laurels and that the job is a continuous learning curve and journey of constant incremental improvements. Looking to the future, how are you planning to build on the improvements you’ve made in the past year.

Matt: You can’t rest on your laurels – you need to be more and more proactive by investing in systems and technology that allows you to do that. We also make sure we are moving forward with the times – we’ve purchased 40 electric vehicles, now getting wraps & livery, so we can distribute them to our drivers. We purchased direct rather than through a leasing company. We can borrow money cheaper as we get preferential rates, and it allows us a greater ownership of the downtime of the vehicle so we can do what we need to get the vehicle back on the road. So, if it means spending more money because the driver is back on the road faster or bringing in different parts – recycling / green parts etc we have more control.

We are moving to an outright purchase model. We have another 25 vehicles on order which gives us a lot of advantages in supporting Platform on downtime. We are gong to purchase pool vehicles so if a vehicle goes down we can get a fully kitted vehicle to the driver so they can carry with their day. We move the other vehicle into a repair shop and get it sorted – it’s an investment but it means we don’t rely on trying to procure hire vehicles and it allows us to manage our operation more effectively.

Simon: This fits in perfectly with our theme of Safer Vehicles - they look like initiatives to maintain your vehicles as safely as possible and get the vehicles back on the road in the quickest time.

You can get more details of these initiatives in the Platform Housing case study on our website at drivingforbetterbusiness.com

Matt, thank you very much for being my guest on this episode of ‘Let’s Talk Fleet Risk’

*********************** (transition)

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don’t forget to hit subscribe - so you know when the next episode is released. And please also give us a 5-star review, as this helps us to get up the podcast rankings, and makes it more visible to others who might also find it useful. You can follow us – that’s Driving for Better Business on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And most importantly, please help us to spread the word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets and their employees who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode.

October is National Tyre Safety Month, organised by the charity TyreSafe. I’m joined for this episode by Stuart Lovatt – the new Chairman of TyreSafe – to talk about why fleet operators should get involved with this year’s campaign.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/tyre-safety-35000-tyre-incidents-a-year-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/

TyreSafe https://tyresafe.org/  

Simon: October is National Tyre Safety Month, organised by the charity TyreSafe.

I’m joined for this episode by Stuart Lovatt – the new Chairman of TyreSafe – to talk about why fleet operators should get involved with this year’s campaign.

Hi Stuart and welcome to the podcast.

Congratulations on your new appointment. We’ve known each other many years from your previous role as Strategic Road Safety Lead at National Highways – could you start with a brief introduction to TyreSafe for listeners who maybe aren’t familiar with it?

Stuart: Yes of course – my own experience in working with TyreSafe went back to 2006 at the Prince Michael of Kent Road safety Awards, at that time I started to understand what TyreSafe was, prior to them becoming a registered road safety charity. I started to understand more and more about the importance of tyres and what that means for trying to reduce the number of incidents on the network. My role within in National Highways – we could be looking at something like 35,000 tyre related incidents on the strategic road network, and that network is only 3.5% of roads within the country, so you can extrapolate that and think of how many incidents mut be happening each year. To me the importance of safer tyres became an increasing concern that more needed to be done in this field, so I’m pleased to say that something like 16 years I’ve been working on tyre safety and so upon my retirement form National Highways it was very kind of TyreSafe to offer me the Chair of the organisation to carry on the work I was hoping to do when I was in National Highways.

Simon: 35,000 tyre incidents a year is a staggering amount – and that leads onto my first question - DfBB often puts out information talking about the need for regular vehicle checks because the DVSA statistics show really big failure rates for MOTs on both cars and vans. The number that fail an MOT at the first attempt is a staggering amount. How big a problem is tyre safety for company vehicles?

Stuart: I think it would be fair to say that safety of tyres and the importance within keeping your vehicle on the road is probably not very well understood and that’s not just people who are driving on business – it’s generally that people don’t understand the importance. We talk about business tyre safety – these 4 things that are actually touching the road ( or two tings if you’re on a 2 wheeler) and it’s that piece of machinery, a very complex piece of machinery, it’s that which can actually help you to stop if something unexpected happens on the journey. It’s not just drivers on business – it’s a general campaign that I think what business can do and from our previous work with Driving for Better Business, it’s important we continue to raise awareness as you said, your daily checks before you set off, a more detailed weekly and monthly check - its continuously reminding the drivers, the fleet managers, the depot mangers about the importance of doing these checks and that’s why in Tyresafe we have the acronym to ACT upon your tyres – air, condition and tread - because anyone of those can lead to a failure which can have not only consequences around the actual journey but potentially much more serious consequences.

Simon: Yes, air, condition and tread is a very good acronym and it forms the basis for a lot of your campaigns, but one of the good things I think about Tyresafe, is the messages are all backed up by hard evidence and research you’ve done. I wanted to talk about that. One of the recent research projects was National Highways together with Bridgestone and TyreSafe on the causes of HGV tyre failures on the SRN. What did you find?

Stuart: That research that we did was a very good piece – we collected the debris on the road and very often when you are coming to do research you think you know what you’re going to find, but of course, it’s always enlightening when you’re proven wrong. We thought that retread tyres in company vehicles would be a cause of tyre failures leading to debris.

Unfortunately, we’ve had fatalities of people who have hit tyre debris so it’s a growing concern within NH but also again generally across the industry. It’s not just the tyre bursting – I’ve seen CCTV footage where a vehicle’s tyres have burst and gone through the central reservation and hit oncoming traffic. What we found actually was it wasn’t the retreads, it was actually a significant under-inflation of tyres, leading to a build up of heat in the tyre which then caused the tyre to fail. For those who are more familiar with this the Psi on a heavier tyre is like a mini bomb going off – when it does finally give. It can ultimately lead to loss of control of the vehicle. You see these vehicles hitting central reservations because you do lose control so that was a very interesting piece of research which has helped to change our thinking and for us to re-push those messages about the need to constantly check your tyre pressures. We have other research on the tread depth, but this particular one is helping us to get that message across. People need to check their tyre pressures more regularly than they are.

Simon: I’ve seen CCTV of some of those HGV tyres blowing out and it’s really quite spectacular and you realise you don’t want to be in the vicinity when that happens, so any fleet operator would be wise to have look at some of those videos if you don’t have an appropriate pressure checking regime as part of your vehicle checks.

Stuart: There is actually new technology now that you can use to help you monitor that for heavy vehicles.

Simon: Presumably they have pressure monitors as well so how does the new technology work?

Stuart: You can attach them to the tyres and it helps you to alert you when the tyre pressure starts to drop, so it is certainly something that fleet managers can check on more regularly – tyre pressure is not something you are going to pick up as a driver when you do your daily walk around – this is something that can be done weekly or monthly which will start to see those pressures starting to drop. As your tyre pressures start to drop actually you could only have 50% of the tyre touching the road surface so that’s what causing the heat that is dangerous. Going back to CCTV, I once saw a clip of a National Highways traffic officer who had to put a rolling road block on to remove tyre debris. This thing was probably several feet long – it was the length of a traffic officer and these can weigh up to 80Kg so we had to stop the entire motorway network while it was removed, so even if there’s no catastrophic failure, the debris alone means we have to shut the network while it’s removed and so therefore its leading to more business delays and disruption and these are the kind of things irrespective of potential consequences for injury or the loss of that vehicle and the insurance costs and downtime that comes from that. All that leads to affecting the business bottom line so all this can be linked in to generally trying to support business which is why we are so delighted to be working with DfBB on the whole issue of work related road risk and fleet management.

Simon: So this research was around HGV tyres – you mentioned some other research around tread depths. As I understand it that bought in cars and vans as well?

Stuart: Yes, back in 2016 with TyreSafe we did a project on tread depth – it was 6 years ago now. The campaign talked about 1 in 4 vehicles potentially had an illegal tyre in terms of tread depth. 70% had below 2mm – the thickness of a credit card – so we tried to remind people within your fleets you should be starting to check the tyre more regularly and replacing it when it goes below 3mm. Once you get to 2mm it’s the thickness of a credit card before it becomes illegal. If you’re doing a lot of miles that tread will very quickly burn off. Prior to previous economic downturns, a lot of business and public sector organisations had a policy of changing the tyres at 3mm – and that started to drop and people ran them for a bit longer. The issue we found at that time was we needed to remind businesses and the general public on the need to be checking much more regularly. As we hit harsher financial times and we talk about recession and cost of living, it’s a good time to remind businesses it’s a false economy not to replace them. National Highways has partnered with TyreSafe this year to look at where people have made that decision, and there’s over 133 retailers who are supporting this research by checking tyres, and this research will go onto about March 2023.

We have already checked about 150,000 tyres and that data will be analysed and checked to see if there’s been a difference – improvement or getting worse. We have that research as an independent evaluation by Imperial College London who can give that research some academic rigour and independence so they will help to produce the information and we can then work with people like Driving for better Business and other strategic partners to raise awareness of the findings. Previous research helped us to get some key messages out and I think this will be the same – potentially we might find some information that surprises us as well.

Simon: I’ve been involved with random car park checks of business drivers and fleet vehicles over the years and there can be a tendency to think that a tyre takes a while to wear down to that level, but actually if you have drivers doing high mileage it’s amazing how quickly that last bit of tread can wear down. I’ve seen what have been ostensibly new vehicles have illegal tyres and that’s staggering so the initial research you did showed quite a significant number of tyres that were illegal below 1.6mm at the time they were changed, didn’t it?

Stuart: Yes, the owner of that vehicle or the company that booked in a regular replacement, or from an MOT advisory, the owner of the vehicle has already made a decision to replace that tyre. That’s the importance of this research. They seem to be surprised that the retailer tells them that tyre is already illegal, so what’s alarming people are again and I think this goes across company car drivers and grey fleet drivers, to raise the awareness of the consequences. We have talked about collisions and serious crashes but actually the potential consequence includes 3 points for an illegal tyre and up to £2500 fine so if you’re driving on buinss your putting yourlicence ta risk as well as your ability to drive on business if you lose your licence.

Simon: An interesting point about the 3 points and the £2500 fine – just to reiterate that is per tyre. The police have the ability to give you those points for each tyre so if you do have 4 bald tyres they can give you 12 points and a £10,000 fine.

Stuart: Well, the courts can, and for multiple tyre failures they’d look at it more seriously, and it gives the police the ability to prosecute. Where there are multiple tyres they are more likely to go for a prosecution rather than giving you a producer to get that tyre sorted. Another piece of research we are doing this year, we have worked with the police where there has been a collision and the vehicle has not been able to be driven away and it’s been taken to a police compound, we thank the police forces who have supported us, to understand that once a collision has taken place, what was the condition of those tyres? One of the things we have found is that the initial cause might be an innocuous bump, so maybe no one has been prosecuted but we have been able to look at the tyres and take them off to look at them. I think many of the listeners will be surprised that the state of those tyres – many had damage sidewall damage, many had actually been repaired, and we’re not saying they’re all company vehicles, but may had unseen damage and were not being checked and this had led to a failure of the tyre, and collisions waiting to happen. One of the most alarming statistics was that the oldest tyre we found was manufactured in 1981. That was still being driven until the incident occurred so there are some very old tyres out there. Is it any wonder that sometimes they fail.

Simon: You mentioned grey fleet where employees are using their own cars for work and it’s a significant amount of business traffic. Recent estimates before COVID were around 14 million that use our own cars for business journeys in some form. That may well have increased as some employees are designated as working from home – so for employers that think they manage tyres on their company vehicles they still have to think about the employees who are using their own cars for work. Effectively the company is commandeering that vehicles as a company car for that journey, so they have that legal responsibility. Generally, they have much less oversight over the condition of that vehicle and its tyres so where people have repaired tyres, where people are running a 40 year old tyre, which is ridiculous, but tyres have a shelf life and I know TyreSafe have done a lot of work around 2nd hand tyres so businesses have a lot to think about when it comes to grey fleet.

Stuart: Absolutely and that’s the point of working with Driving for Better Business to raise awareness of these issues that people may not have been aware of. One of the things from working with yourself over the years, we’re talking about correct company policies and procedures to protect the company if the police or the HSE knock on the door to tell you someone from your business has been involved in a crash, and what we are seeing is more than half of the tyres have some form of damage in air, condition or tread damage and this could lead to prosecution of directors or fleet managers for example, where it has been perceived that this has been an ongoing issue - so I think it’s important we get the message across – to have the correct policies in place as a form of insurance. Under the road traffic act to use, cause or commit an offence if the company knows about this or hasn’t got correct polices under the health and safety at work act and various legislation, the companies could find themselves under investigation and potentially prosecuted.

I like the message within Driving for Better Business around the legal and the moral and the financial responsibility. We talked about the moral – it’s important that business are operating correctly and helping to reduce the risk to their own work force and to the general public – but also to look after the financial aspects – it’s a false economy not to be looking after your tyres and can lead to significant costs – also reputational damage, if your vehicles are involved in a tyre blow and we see pictures of branded vehicles on the network. The financial aspects of not getting the policy right can be significant.

Simon: I think it’s interesting on some of that important research – as you release the findings, we will share that with our audience as well. I believe that part of what you want to do is grow its presence among road risk stakeholders’ management. How do you plan to make the TyreSafe campaign relevant to fleet operators and driver safety managers?

Stuart: I want to keep moving it forward so that TyreSafe is seen to be an integral part of the road safety agenda – not just an add-on. Whether we talk about the SAFE system and of course the vehicle, the people, the impact of this particular area, the research we’ve done at the crash compound – all this feeds into the post collision understanding on cause – so I want to help to continue to raise awareness to support our partners whether that’s the police, the DVSA, the inspectors, local authorities as develop and support their local strategies. We want to support the national Government Strategy. There’s a lot that TyreSafe can do to raise awareness of what can be done – most of this is within the vehicle owners and operators remit to significant reduce the risk. We will continue to develop new innovative campaigns as we move forward. This year’s campaigns – we would love your listeners to log in to TyreSafe.org and to use that campaign material. And to check your tyres and to make some corrective measures if required. Check your tyres regularly, your pressures - this year’s campaign will be around, ‘if your tyres don’t stop you, what will?’ Another vehicle? If you stepped out into the road, a potential crash barrier or street furniture you could potentially hit causing huge financial and other drastic consequences to the driver and the business itself. There are great opportunities to work with partners and that’s what I want to do – to continue to develop these partnerships and to grow it so it becomes almost an integral part of the mindset of getting in your vehicle. You know your tyres are safe and you are fit to go onto the network.

Another part of this year’s campaign is a reminder of TPMS – tyre pressure monitoring systems. Many people don’t understand that cars have them, and we hear alarming stories that people are taking the fuse out when the light comes on, when they go for an MOT. They don’t understand what that means and the potential consequences, including fatal consequences of driving with under-inflated or over-inflated tyres. We have an animation for fleet managers which your listeners can look at on our website, so if the light does come on, they will know what it is! By joining and supporting TyreSafe you have access to all these resources and the back catalogue of resources which businesses can use as part of their efforts to raise awareness across their drivers and fleets, to reduce risks in relation to tyre failures.

Simon: That’s brilliant Stuart – DfBB has a focus now on the broader subject of vehicle safety so throughout October we will be supporting TyreSafe safety month and campaign - so within out resource bank we have a lot of resources that can help with tyre safety and can be shared with drivers. I know that on your website you have animations and banners and information and infographics that employers can share with their drivers. I’d encourage any fleet manager or business owner to go to tyresafe.org and download those resources and share far and wide – not just your company drivers but staff who drive privately as well. You’ve invested in them as an employer. The tyre message is important for everybody.

Thanks for a fascinating discussion Stuart and I wish you well in your new position – and look forward in continuing the work we do in the future.

*********************** (transition)

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don’t forget to hit subscribe - so you know when the next episode is released. And please also give us a 5-star review, as this helps us to get up the podcast rankings, and makes it more visible to others who might also find it useful. You can follow us – that’s Driving for Better Business on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And most importantly, please help us to spread the word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets and their employees who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode.

My guest for this episode is Tavid Dobson who is the road risk lead for RSSB – the Rail Safety and Standards Board. Tavid is leading efforts to get rail sector organisations including Network Rail, train and freight operating companies and construction firms to collaborate on an innovative project to improve road risk management across an entire industry. National Highways and the Driving for Better Business programme are working closely with Tavid to ensure its success.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/tavid-dobson/

Tavid Dobson on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tavid-dobson-365203116/

RSSB https://www.rssb.co.uk/

Simon: Increasingly, good management of work-related road risk is becoming a pre-requisite for winning new work, with the power of procurement being used to drive up standards through supply chains, and even across entire sectors. Rail is one sector where this approach is being rolled out

My guest for this episode is Tavid Dobson who is the road risk lead for RSSB – the Rail Safety and Standards Board. Tavid is leading efforts to get rail sector organisations including Network Rail, train and freight operating companies and construction firms to collaborate on an innovative project to improve road risk management across an entire industry. National Highways and the Driving for Better Business programme are working closely with Tavid to ensure its success.

Tavid, welcome to the show.

Simon: My first question is that everyone understands the railways can be a dangerous environment to work in. What does safety management mean in your world

Tavid:   Safety management systems and application is incredibly important – it’s a very dangerous environment with lots of engineering and passengers moving around. It helps to recognise lots inf incidents over the years like the Kings Cross Fire and Clapham Junction which helps us focus to ensure we manage the risks and the causes of those risks. We now have a mature approach to this management, but the roads area is something we haven’t looked at until recently.

Simon: When we talk about the rail sector we think about trains and the obvious risks, but what are the typical road risks you have to manage in the rail industry?

Tavid:  This is an interesting question. I think there’s an assumption that it’s just about road fleets. The rail industry has unique road risk profiles to address. Taxis – procurement of taxis, replacement buses,  and there are road fleets obviously. Network rail has a road fleet of 10,000 vehicles and there’s the road fleets within each of the supply chain areas. There’s also grey fleet, people using 2 wheels, so there’s a whole range of areas we have to take account of and obviously the process and standards we are looking at need to address all of those.

Simon: Now I’ve worked with businesses in other traditional hazardous industries such as energy production or dangerous manufacturing processes, and  I’ve found it can be common in other traditionally hazardous industries for business leaders and safety professionals to focus solely on the hazardous work and either forget, or fail to see the level of risk involved in driving. What’s driven the increase in focus on road risk?

Tavid: There’s been a number of key areas coming to light – it’s been activated by things like CIRUS who identified the issues around fatigue and we’ve also had a number of fatalities investigated by the LORR recently so I think we realised that road risk is a significant issue when we’re killing more of our staff on the roads than on the railway itself.

Simon: What’s the split between incidents on road and rail within the sector?

Tavid: Quite a difficult one to pin down because the data we have is quite poor. It’s influenced by even as far as the DFT in terms of how the Stat 19 information is provided but within our own safety management info systems it’s difficult to get accurate data so quite a lot is anecdotal so we need to encourage companies to provide us with the data.

Simon: In the introduction I talked about this as a collaborative project – I know collaboration is one of your real focuses for this kind of work How are you involving the different areas of the rail sector to make sure we get the right approach as an industry wide approach?

Tavid: The industry has a strategy called Leading Health and Safety of British Railways and road risk is one of the 12 significant areas where we can benefit from collaboration among all the parties. We set up a road risk group to be a forum to bring the parties together and what we’ve started to do is to introduce sector road risk groups to encourage companies and members to share and to learn and generate good practice for reducing and managing road risk

Simon: So, I sit on one of those groups as do some of my colleagues from National Highways and it’s a really insightful place to be because across those groups we’ve got dozens of people from a huge range of organisations contributing different viewpoints that you wouldn’t have thought as you don’t have the same experience so it’s providing a benefit to a complete understanding of what that risk is about and how it arises and the best options for implementing solutions isn’t it?

Tavid: It is and I think the focus around each of the railway sectors with Network Rail as the infrastructure manager, train operating companies an freight operating  companies, supply chain and contractors – we’ve tried to put in a whole range of experts around these people from insurance companies, regulators from ORR and HSE together with other benchmarking partners like TFL and HS2 and this gives us a healthy environment to start sharing good practice and get better analysis so we’re better informed on the types of improvement programmes we can focus on across the rail sectors. There is no one size fits all. Each sector has a unique range of risks - taxis and replacement buses, with the supply chain the movement of workers using minibuses and other light goods vehicles and network rail has it’s own fleet of 10,000 vehicles so all these sectors require different things to help them manage the risk. The idea is to distil that and working with the Driving for Better Business team we now have a good solution to provide that one stop shop where everyone can go for good guidance and information to help them manage road risk.

Simon: How do you see DfBB contributing to this project? We’ve been working on this together for some time now, what do you see as the contribution DfBB can bring?

Tavid: Immense. The Railway industry – we’re focused on the railway. We even refer to road vehicles as non-rail vehicles. So I am pleased we have developed this relationship. I think of National Highways as the landlord of the roads and the DfBB programme and the key work it’s done. We’re privileged to have the opportunity to grow and develop  the programme to help the rail industry around this collaborative framework we’ve been building. We’ve been lucky to have one of the DfBB representatives as our rail Industry representative providing that guidance to the teams.

Simon: Driving across what needs to happen and how people should be viewing work related road risk because it’s easy for people in hazardous industry not to understand the level of road risk so that direct involvement with the Dfbb team working closely with the various partners in this collaboration helping them understand what the best way of approaching this issue is – that’s worked well hasn’t it?

Tavid: It has and the big area for me is seeing the increase in understanding by the safety management teams. Road risk is a health and safety risk, and we need to make sure the safety management systems are properly addressing this particular risk. It is significant. To be fair, it’s a cultural change in behaviours that we are trying to introduce. It’s a slow process like change always is but with better data and knowledge and experience we are starting to influence areas like fatigue management, working hours, making sure that journeys are planned better. There are significant changes that are coming which will help to raise that effectiveness.

Simon: The DfBB seven -step framework came out of the work we’ve done together –to help risk managers, driver managers, work through the necessary steps to improve work related road risk management, starting from raising your own awareness of the issues you need to deal with, understanding base line points and whether there are any gaps in your management systems, how to improve the culture by sharing resources and raising awareness and constantly measuring and monitoring – and then right up to the point where you can start to see benefits and share that as a story to inspire others to do the same. What many people won’t realise is that 7 step framework came out of our work together with the rail sector - how are you planning to engage businesses in the rail sector and get them to start using the DfBB framework?

Tavid: Yes, thank-you I think there are 3 key areas which support the 7 steps. The first is the charter which we’ve introduced – the occupational road risk management charter which is a commitment statement by each of the MDs and CEOs of rail companies and organisations to commit their companies to signing up and using the DfBB programme. That’s a significant introduction of commitment of leadership, the ability to support the resources necessary to make it happen. The second step is the introduction of the rail sector page on the DfBB programme website and now the introduction of portals which will help each company to focus on the guidance and be proactive in the DfBB programme to make sure they are properly directed to the resources. The 3rd one is the appointment of the road risk champions who are key – that we identify each representative for each company so we can communicate directly on railway matters like analysis and research and to get better use of the DfBB programme.

Simon: The Road Risk Champions are really important – that’s something that other businesses and sectors could easily pick up on. What these companies and organisations are trying to do is identify someone in the organisation, someone who takes on the responsibility of ensuring that these actions are met – they’re responsible for leading the engagement with senior managers and with drivers and championing this issue throughout the business. Getting them to take it seriously and being the liaison with the rail industry – a lot of these people are expected to sit on some of these groups and share practice and stories with their counterparts aren’t they. It's a really key appointment, isn’t it?

Tavid: It is significant, we all remember back in the day when we put the 7 steps together and it’s only really worked when somebody understands what those 7 steps are and how to communicate the info to make it happen. The road risk champion is a significant role and as we move forward, we will develop competencies and training around this individual. They do sit on the sector road risk groups, it does feedback into the main road risk groups and we have that point of contact, and these guys are absolutely key to making sure that we raise the awareness of the risk and the ability to make sure it is rolled out across their own companies.

Simon: What do you see as the key next steps with this now because we’ve got to a point where we have done a lot of the work behind it and developed the programme. We’re really starting to get that engagement going with the businesses – the road risk champions are contributing their thought processes and driving it forward. Where’s the focus at this particular point in the project?

Tavid: So we’re bedding down the sector road risk groups, the rail industry now has 3 out of 4 set up and there’s one more to do with the passenger operator sector. Once they’re in place we have the opportunity to directly communicate with them. In January 2023 we are launching an annual benchmarking assessment using the DfBB gap analysis tool so that we are able to gather that analysis to determine where each company improve and what it needs to do itself to improve the risk management of occupational road risk and we can also help the sectors to understand what they can work on together to address issues  within that organisation and nationally, so we get a picture of how the overall benefits are for the industry as whole. So it’s a powerful way forward and that will give us the opportunity to engage with the industry to get that commitment to roll out the continuous improvement we’re looking for.

Simon: It is quite an ambitious project with strong goals in improvements in risk management and reduction in incidents – there’s a lot of effort gone into this. How is it going to be evaluated by RSSB – the rollout and effectiveness of the programme over the coming years?

Tavid: With the road risk champions in place we have the opportunity to directly have those communications and help to support them. We have got a DfBB rail industry representative working with us but we have a whole team and what we’re trying to do is make sure through the sector groups, each rail company has that opportunity to contribute and work with us. Much analysis will be done through survey and through those sector groups and some of it will look specifically at particular areas. One key area is accident investigation. The best way to improve and prevent incidents from happening again is to investigate properly and share those findings and that’s an area of great weakness at the moment. We recognise if we can improve that we can make further improvements in effective management of road risk.

Simon: A good final question for you would be - what lessons can businesses, and indeed other sectors, learn from this industry-wide collaboration to raise standards of risk management in their own sectors?

Tavid: The biggest lesson is the willingness to have the conversation and to share data and good practice. I think everybody recognizes that road risk is a risk we all do – we all drive cars, not just around, but also in some cases for work, and everybody thinks they understand the risks. The fact is we kill more people on the roads through work that any other work force related type of incident and so it’s time we helped businesses to recognize the significant impact on their business and their workforce and on the public.

So, my lessons are – engage – and particularly get engaged wth Driving for Better Business. They have a great team, they’re there to answer questions, I’ve been lucky to work with them closely over the last 5 years and have the benefit of their knowledge and their expertise

Simon: It’s been a great pleasure working with you and all our colleagues on this project. It’s a fascinating project and I’m looking forward to continuing that good work over the coming years. Thanks for being my guest today.

"It’s picking the message and not throwing rocks at people but saying there is scope for improvement to gain the benefits – reduced spend on fuel, reduced incident collision, less hassle for the drivers, getting to the first job in a better frame of mind. I work with fleet managers day to day and through the AFP, and getting drivers to acknowledge that the driving element is as important as general health and safety when they get to their first job on site is a challenge."

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/strong-leadership-in-driver-risk-management-delivering-business-benefits

Stewart Lightbody on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartlightbody/

Matrix IQ Risk Management (formerly Driive) https://matrixiq.com/risk-management/

Association of Fleet Professionals (AFP) https://www.theafp.co.uk/

AFP Education & Training https://www.theafp.co.uk/education-training/

Simon: Hello everyone and welcome to the August edition of Let’s Talk Fleet Risk. At Driving for Better Business, we’re currently focused on promoting the business benefits that flow from good management of drivers, and how strong leadership is key to this. My guest this month is Stewart Lightbody.

Stewart is a former fleet manager, with experience running very large fleets with thousands of vehicles for companies like Siemens, Kier, Anglian Water and M Group. He is also currently Deputy Chairman of the Association of Fleet professionals. Stewart is a recent winner of the Fleet News Fleet Manager of the Year; however, he has now decided to use that experience to help others, and last year joined Driive Consulting as Fleet Innovation and EV Manager.

Stewart, welcome to the show.

Simon: We showcase some amazing achievements from organisations that manage road risk well. They show significant reductions in collisions and equally significant improvements in business efficiency, performance, cost control, sustainability, etc. How important is strong leadership in driver risk management to delivering those achievements?

Stewart: In my experience it’s critical. Fleet managers normally aspire to do their best for the business and supporting their drivers, and sometimes the results coming back and the things needed to make those changes require some significant business input. Sign off at board level as well in a lot of cases. You’re looking at human behaviour and trying to make decisions in day to day life at the same level which is a challenge and also for them, you start to see data coming through that you want to look at and it is getting the leadership teams on the operations side - to understand you’re not necessarily criticising but trying to get a comparison of where the driver is in comparison to another driver or set of drivers so they can see potentially - through coaching and supporting - you can get that driver to improve. It won’t happen overnight as you are trying to unravel potentially 30 to 40 years of driver experience and driver habits and it’s not until you see it in black and white – for some drivers that can be intimidating. It’s picking the message and not throwing rocks at people but saying there is scope for improvement to gain the benefits – reduced spend on fuel, reduced incident collision, less hassle for the drivers, getting to the first job in a better frame of mind. It’s not an easy message to land – the driving element is not as key as the general health and safety. I work with fleet managers day to day and through the AFP, and getting drivers to acknowledge to that the driving element is as important as general health and safety when they get to their first job on site is a challenge.

Simon: You mentioned you look at reports on a regular basis –you mentioned operations – how do you go about impressing on others why this data is so important in making improvements? In a bigger business you have to push that up to the board on a regular basis and in a smaller business maybe other stakeholders looking at driver risk as a part time role so how do you ensure that people understand the importance? What’s your experience of how well business leaders understand the need to do this, and their understanding of how this can lead to a better performing business?

Stewart: I think it’s tailoring the message – in the early days I probably made the mistake of almost being a one trick pony because it was my view, if if our average was 25 mile sto the gallon in the average panel van, and I said I think we should be pushing 30 – it was almost subjective as to what that target should be. I think I learnt to tailor the message to every stakeholder by understanding what their objectives were and their views on the subject.

Some were very finance driven so actually if we are going to reduce our collision rate by 10% I put it into monetary terms for them. I would see the value of a one-to-one conversation with my driver - when you reduce your harsh braking – and they could see it in pounds and pence so they could buy into it. Others were not interested in the financial aspect. They were more interested in the wellbeing and safety of their drivers. So, it’s knowing your audience and understanding what they want to achieve and then working out how I could help them. I found that was the best way of getting their buy-in, especially over time. When we started to then track performance I could show them a continuing downward trend on their fuel spend or continued up time because the driver was on the road more often. Then you can have wider conversations and they buy-in to what we want to achieve.

Simon: Yes, it’s so important to have everyone pulling in the same direction and different people in different areas understanding how it impacts them in their own area. You are working with a number of fleets at Driive & speaking to lots of fleet managers in your role at the AFP – are there any areas of managing driver risk that they are particular concerned about?

Stewart: It’s the sheer amount of data. Fleet managers – people think you get to look at shiny new metal, place new company car orders, but it’s much bigger than that. It’s now a risk management role. So, it’s having the understanding of their drivers, and a lot of them tend to work in isolation is what I find. It can be quite a lonely role you’re trying to change the world from inside the organisation., So the challenge is understanding who your key stakeholders are and managing driver risk sits on the fleet manager’s shoulder and actually, largely, we don’t put the drivers to work. It feels like a poisoned chalice as you have awareness of what’s going on, but you don’t necessarily have everything you need or direct access to the drivers to do something different. It’s that intimidation piece – it’s a very big subject and lots of opportunities to improve safety and wellbeing but it’s not all in the gift of the fleet manager. So, some feel more isolated than ever because of the sheer amount of change - delays to new vehicles, electrification of the journey – all this has gone on top of what is a fantastic but challenging role as a fleet manager.

Simon: Your role at Driive also includes EVs – are there any areas of risk management that people should be looking at if they’re new to EVs?

Stewart: A lot of fleet managers feel under pressure with the EV Transition – that they must progress electrification with everything now. That’s not the case. Company cars are going that way – taxation policy is driving that change – having significant increases in fully electric car numbers – that’s heading in that direction, other than the cost parity and understanding where your total cost of ownership is going. On the van side its far more confusing – trying to find an asset that will do the job and not run out of juice before the day is done is not so clear. Consider electrification as part of what’s happening but not too much onus on the electric vehicle element because the biggest thing is the driver induction piece is done – but that should be happening with ICE vehicles as well so moving from one vehicle to another its very easy to say I’ve driven a van for 20 years and moving from one van manufacturer to another it’s no different, so I’ll be fine. That handover piece has always been important – the advantages on moving to an EV need to be maximised if you’re going to prevent some cost creep because EVs tend to be faster and they drive differently so make sure your driver has embraced the good things – the battery regeneration, certainly when I’m driving around in my EV, I don’t break now unless it’s an emergency situation because if I’m driving around using my regeneration to top up my fuel level that’s an important piece – otherwise the drivers have all this new found power in electric vehicles but don’t the most of their EV range so I think it should be happening anyway but not as strong as it could be and if you want to maximise all the good stuff it needs to be.

Simon: I think it’s critical - when you were talking about fleet managers feeling isolated – managing EVs is something they’ve got to get on top of fairly quickly but I guess supporting fleet managers through some of these challenges is the role of the AFP. Do you want to talk about some of the benefits our listeners get from joining the AFP?

Stewart: In my role at Driive I work on a one-to-one basis. What the AFP does is a number of committees – I chair the LCV committee, and I co-chair with Paul Hollick on the EV electrification and alternative fuels one. We have some of the largest fleets in the UK as members & some fantastic fleet service providers who have infinite knowledge and experience, so we talk about these things, and we understand from the membership and the industry what the challenges are. We put together best practice and policy documents so if you find yourself in that boat and you’re asking questions and you don’t know where to go we have probably already covered it so rather than reinventing the wheel it may be worth making use of some of that knowledge and wisdom. If you invest in the membership, we are the voice of the fleet operator to protect and speak on behalf of anyone running fleets – cars and vans – we support our membership who run vehicles of any type and our membership is prepared to share what they’ve learnt on the journey they’ve already made. We really try to make that transition easier for organisations and rather than run down rabbit holes we aim to make that electrification journey quicker and easier and it puts you in a stronger position.

Simon: So, they’re learning from the experience of your wide range of membership in the AFP. Have you got any final words of wisdom for managers. What’s the key lesson you’ve learnt from your days as a fleet manager?

Stewart: I think my journey over the last 20 years has been a continual learning one -what it was 20 years ago is not what it is now. Try not to look at things one dimensionally - we talked about telematics earlier, normally when you make a business case, getting it signed off, you’re chasing one metric – reduce collisions, improve fuel efficiency or reduce speeding – all those things are achievable together, So if you’re investing in something maximise the investment, I found that if you invest in telematics you should look at every opportunity that comes out of it, I learnt more in my first year of using telematics than I probably would have talking to people for 3 years. I proactively chose to something more with the data I was given. It’s easy when you’re swamped with data to put the lid back on the box. Once you’ve opened that lid you may as well do the most with it because I think that’s where the rewards come from. They can be slow-burn but if you look at it with a holistic view and try to change things slowly rather than with one big bang – invariably that’s short lived – I was looking for more organic change over time and keeping track of where we were going and moving small levers to tweak it – don’t just carry on the same path - things change all the time and that data will tell you where you need to step in and do something.

Simon: Great advice - Stewart, I really enjoyed our conversation, thank you for sharing some of your insights with us. I’ll include the links to the Driive website and the AFP website in the show notes.

***********************

(transition)

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don’t forget to hit subscribe - so you know when the next episode is released. And please also give us a 5-star review, as this helps us to get up the podcast rankings, and makes it more visible to others who might also find it useful. You can follow us – that’s Driving for Better Business on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And most importantly, please help us to spread the word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets and their employees who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/leadership-in-road-risk-management-do-you-pick-up-the-phone/

TVL Security https://www.tvl-ltd.co.uk/

Tell TVL https://www.telltvl.co.uk/

Van Driver Toolkit https://vandrivertoolkit.co.uk

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk - a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.

30 vans are stolen each day which is a 45% increase over the last 4 years plus over £60million in lost tools and other items. My guest today is Laura Moran, MD at TVL Group which is the UK specialist for commercial vehicle security products and a tier 1 OEM supplier to some of the biggest van manufacturers.

Simon: Welcome Laura. I’d like to cover 2 topics – why van security is part of driver risk management and what employers should be doing about it, and also, as the MD of a business yourself how important leadership is in driver risk management.

Now I mentioned the statistics regarding stolen vans and content theft which I imagine would represent a huge amount of cost and disruption to any business. Could you talk us through the most common types of incidents and the business disruption these incidents cause?

Laura: Sure – you mentioned statistics around vehicle theft and contents theft. I think the majority of what we are seeing and some of the survey statistics show that it’s tool theft which is 67% content stolen from vehicles. There’s some other research from the Federation Master of Builders across their membership, showing that 51% of their members have had vans broken into and tools stolen. It’s a hot topic. Unfortunately, vehicle crime is linked to the economy. When there is high unemployment, you see a rise in vehicle crime. What we do have now is the cost-of-living issue which is also fuelling vehicle crime. It is on the increase. In terms of the disruption it causes it’s a very costly inconvenience too, and what we see is where it’s independent traders – builders, plumbers etc, the self-employed guys – they come to us when their vehicles have been attacked, their tools stolen – it’s their livelihood so they cant work and they can’t’ earn money. |They need to repair the vehicle so it really is costly and in terms of the value of the contents stolen the figures we’ve had show the average cost of the contents stolen is just over £4000. It really does cause a lot of disruption to people’s livelihoods

Simon: I guess there’s an increased cost of insurance for those people but even one-man bands, contractors, many of those will work as contractors to larger companies, part of a larger company’s supply chain so it still has a knock on to a bigger organisation as well.

Laura: Absolutely – it’s a costly inconvenience across all van fleets. The major van fleets are using contractors on service levels etc so they will have penalties involved if they don’t have a van that’s operational. Financial penalties in addition to the actual theft of tools and vans.

Simon: I understand you’ve launched a campaign called ‘Tell TVL’

Laura: It’s an initiative we launched last week – it’s something we’ve been working on for a number of months now. The police in terms of their crime reporting, they have very basic crime reporting codes. If you have your tools stolen it will go down as theft of contents from a motor vehicle. And that could be a pair of sunglasses, or it could £5K worth of tools from a van. They don’t have the granular detail. There’s a lot of campaigning at the moment to increase the crime reporting codes for better intel. That’s the challenge.

You’ve also got 43 regional police forces and there’s differences in the way they all report so there really isn’t a national picture on the problem of vehicle crime. We’ve worked with a number of police forces, great cooperation and engagement. They asked us if we could provide some of this intel. We see the customers who have had vehicle break ins and we engage with the major fleets who talk to us about their security requirements and share with us new forms of attack and that’s critical in picking up new trends and methods of entering a vehicle. In addition, we also have an informal network of the big van fleet managers, and if one of their vehicles get attacked, they will share it with other van fleet managers. The initiative is around bringing together all of that and creating a national picture of what’s happening with vehicle crime. It’s an online community where you can go on and report what’s happened in terms of vehicle or contents theft – you still have to report it to the police but we’ve worked with the police in terms of the data and it’s backed by the National Business Crime Centre and has backing from the Home Office.

You can ‘Tell TVL’ more details about the incident – we don’t collect personal data. We simply get data on the incident itself. We will then share it with the police in terms of their intelligence, so they get more granular data. If you become a registered user of ‘Tell TVL’ we will send you vehicle crime insights and we do heatmapping to show hotspots as well as alerts if there are new trends or particular hotspots.

That’s our plan – it’s an online community to fight back against vehicle crime. Our message from TVL is we don’t want our customer’s vehicles to be broken into so if we can provide intelligence on how to avoid that happening then that’s a good thing and we’re arming them with the information to try and safeguard their livelihood.

We will be sending crime prevention advice and the National Business Crime Centre; we will host their advice and push it down with the insights so that the van operators have everything they need in terms of trying to secure their livelihoods

That’s Tell TVL – it’s in its early stages. We will be doing some PR around it and we have some good traction. We are already seeing our first crime incident reports coming through and we’re building our registered user database so I’m very optimistic about it. It will help prevent crime hopefully. That’s the primary objective and it will always be free. The crime insights will be free and we will never market to any user.

Simon: It sounds like an excellent campaign - where can people go to find out more?

Laura: website address - tellTVL.co.uk – the website’s there. You can sign up as registered user if you want to receive the crime insights. It’s very new so until we get meaningful data those crime insights won’t be going out just yet, and you can report an incident on there as well.

Simon: Great – we’ll put a link in the show notes for anyone who wants to find out more.

Where do you see vehicle security fitting into overall management of work-related road risk?

Laura: The thing with vehicle security is it isn’t just about securing and protecting the vehicle and the contents. What we do know, working with many of the large parcel delivery companies, they will only secure the vehicle to a certain level. If they go beyond that they have realised they put the driver at risk. If they make it too difficult for thieves, they risk their drivers so that’s the balance. You need to protect your assets and certain fleets are more at risk than others. Your baker and your florist are perhaps not as much a target for contents theft as a builder, utility company and you’re carrying tools, that puts that vehicle more at risk. Equally the parcel delivery companies, people know there’s a lot more vans on the road carrying valuable items, so they are also a target. It becomes about the driver as well depending on what is being carried in the vehicle.

Simon: So, it’s not just incidents of theft overnight, it’s also while the driver is with the vehicle or just temporarily away from the vehicle on someone’s doorstep?

Laura: Unfortunately, we do hear of incidents when the vehicle is attacked when the driver is with the vehicle. It’s getting the balance right between the level of protection and not placing the driver at risk.

Simon: What would be your main tips for business owners and safety managers on where to start with this.

Laura: Some of this in is how the driver responds – if attacks occur while they are with the vehicle, my advice would be let them take it, succumb to it. That comes down to their fleet risk policy. In terms of safeguarding that driver, let the thieves have access and safeguard themselves.

Simon: Moving on. Let’s talk about how TVL manages road risk. Can you give us a brief overview of your fleet and what sort of journeys your drivers undertake?

Laura: We operate a fleet of about 40+ vans so our mobile engineers are travelling nationwide, doing van accessories and fitting vehicle security, they operate every day. In terms of how we manage road risk, when I joined, we already had a driver policy and we managed and reviewed speeding and driver behaviour, and we have now updated and refreshed that policy. You need to take it out and look at least every 12-18 months because so much changes. We’ve updated that driver policy. We have telematics on the vehicle which gives us speeding reports which are reviewed on a daily basis, and we get a weekly summary and a driver’s league table. We also have drivers completing daily fleet checks and we get alerts when they haven’t been done.

We also have some software that will prevent them from moving onto a job if they haven’t done their daily fleet check. We’re trying to automate compliance as much as we can. Aside from the automation, you can have the best policy in the world, you can have telematics, all the reporting in the world, but unless you can get employee engagement it’s not effective as it could be and I think that’s what I’ve focussed on. Making sure our drivers understand why we have all of this – not to make their life difficult or to add work – for their own health and safety. It fits with our culture. We look after our people, and we want to make sure they are safe on the road so its about bringing those policies to life, so they don’t just become tick box exercises. The drivers realise they are being looked at the highest level. I keep an eye on them – we have HR and compliance, but I keep a close eye on driver behaviour and road risk.

Simon: You’re getting daily, weekly reports – do they come directly to you or to a fleet manager? How important is that data to you and how do you oversee that with your team to identify trends?

Laura: I see the summary – a monthly summary – so someone is looking at it daily and I will look at the monthly summary in terms of the league table, who’s speeding etc and at that point they have had discussions in the HR process and what I will then do is pick the phone up and talk to them. They know I recognise they are top of the speeders list and that’s not where I want them to be – the reason we are doing it is to keep them safe. That does tend to drive behaviours. One phone call and the whole team generally know. For them to know I look at this stuff is important and getting to understand why I’m looking at it because I want them to be safe. It’s driving the message home.

Simon: I think that’s a really good example of getting involved because one of the things we try to get across to MDs and CEOs of other businesses who maybe are starting their journey of road risk management of how important it is to have that top down commitment to managing road risk and to discuss these things and look at reports at board level on a regular basis. What would be your message to other business owners on how important that type of insight is?

Laura: I would say critical. I do not want to have any of our employees involved in a road accident that we could have done something to prevent. That’s a responsibility as a leader that you need to accept. You do have a responsibility – I am accountable for that so I want to make sure we have a really good road risk policy so we don’t have incidents, especially ones that could have been prevented. In terms of the metrics that come out – the human costs is my primary concern, but actually, by having a really good road risk policy what we have seen in terms of the financial costs is that our incident rate is reducing and our fuel rate is reducing – we’re getting better fuel efficiency – it’s a really good message to send to our people and enforces the culture of our business which is we want to make sure you are safe – in everything you do – looking after their safety and welfare.

Simon: It sounds like you have really good buy in from your drivers – what do you think the most important actions you’ve taken to build that culture and get driver buy in?

Laura: Picking up the phone and talking to them. It’s the most effective way. If you’re policy is purely a document that you email out, that’s not communication – it’s abdication – you’ve got to get them together so we do drivers talks, each one of them gets a complete refresh on drivers policy when we hand over new vans, talking them through so they understand their responsibilities and then if I see appearing on any of the exception reports for speeding or driving behaviour I’ll pick the phone up and they get the message quite clearly I don’t want to see them on that report. It’s about responsibility and accountability to ensure it’s driven from the top.

Simon: What’s the most important thing that you have done with TVL?

Laura: The overall road risk policy – you never know who’s on the road next to you. I hadn’t been with the business very long when I was driving to work on the M25 and I was doing about 70 and one of our vans overtook me at 90 mph and he got a surprise when I called him and told him I saw him, all of our vans are now speed limited – you never quite know who’s on the road next to you and they forget telematics in the vehicle so knowing it’s looked at and there’s people looking at them reminds them to adjust their driving behaviour.

I am proud of the overall road risk policy but it’s an ongoing thing and so it’s something I check in with at least once a month to see if it’s improving and what else can we do?

Simon: Are there any other issues around security with EVs or are they the same as an ICE vehicle?

Laura: As far as a thief is concerned they don’t care whether it’s EV or ICE – it’s still going to be subject to attack. With EVs we must be more careful of where security products are fitted and how – to make sure we are not drilling or interfering with the electric / battery etc. That’s the only thing.

Simon: Where should listeners go to learn more about TVL and perhaps refresh us on the Tell TVL campaign

Laura: TellTVL.co.uk – for crime insights, crime hotspots

TVL-Ltd.co.uk for details on TVL security

I would say in terms of vehicle security for van fleets it really is about how they operate the fleet and what they’re carrying as to what security is best for them. It’s not a one size fits all. I would recommend going onto the website and have a consultation to ensure you get the right products.

Simon: All the resources will be in the show notes for those interested in vehicle security.

You can also download the For Driving for Better Business Van Driver Toolkit which includes guidance for drivers on both vehicle security and anti-terrorism safety as well, so I’ll add those links as well.

Laura it’s been a fascinating discussion. Thanks very much for being my guest on this episode of Let’s Talk Fleet Risk

Laura: Thanks Simon – it’s been a pleasure.

***********************

(transition)

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles, and you face similar issues to those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful resources on the Driving for Better Business website. And these are all free to access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don’t forget to hit subscribe - so you know when the next episode is released. And please also give us a 5-star review, as this helps us to get up the podcast rankings, and makes it more visible to others who might also find it useful. You can follow us – that’s Driving for Better Business on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. And most importantly, please help us to spread the word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets and their employees who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/managing-the-transition-to-fleet-electrification/

EV Café https://www.evcafe.org/

EV Essentials https://www.ev-essentials.com/

Paul Kirby https://www.linkedin.com/in/thepaulkirby/

DfBB Article: Electric vans and your ‘driving for work’ policy (10/10/2019) https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/articles/electric-vans-and-your-driving-for-work-policy/

Simon: Welcome to Let's Talk Fleet Risk, a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation. This quarter 2, Driving for Better Business is focusing on sustainability, so it seems a great idea to invite Paul Kirby onto a special edition of the Let’s Talk Fleet Risk podcast.

Paul is one of the best-known experts on electric LCVs with over 30 years in the automotive sector. He’s one of the founders of the EV Café and can be seen advocating for electric vans at many of the commercial vehicle shows and conferences. Paul is also the founder of consultancy and training firm EV Essentials.

Welcome to the podcast Paul.

Paul: Thank you very much Simon

Simon: Paul you’ve got something in common with our other podcast guest this month, National Grid Fleet Manager Lorna McAtear – you were both crowned Green Fleet Champions at last year’s Green Fleet Awards. What’s fired up your passion for electric vehicles, and especially electric vans.

Paul: I first drove a Mercedes Benz sprinter electric vehicle in 2004 and when you think about how long its taken for that vehicle to get here it’s incredible, but really, having driven electric vehicles over the last 20 years, what I’ve noticed is that they are such a better environment to be in and when I was working at LeasePlan the company became a member of the EV100 which is a group of businesses all committed to Net Zero by 2023 and the that sort of passion grew to help people. When I saw the environmental benefits, I also saw the driver benefit because I am a great believer in positive mental health and helping people to have a good experience in their vehicles. When you think about the driver behind the wheel of a van they often have a bad reputation but the main reason I believe for that is the stress and pressure they are under in terms of deliveries etc. Electric vehicles take a lot of that away – it’s a much better experience for the driver and ultimately, I believe electric vehicles are safer to drive than their diesel or petrol counterparts. So, there’s a number of reasons, but’s it is focused on getting the job done in a safer more efficient fashion that’s good for the driver.

Simon: You talked about the fact that electric vehicles are safer – why do you think that?

Paul: Having driven vans of all shapes and sizes over the years, if you’re sitting behind the wheel of a diesel vehicle with a gear stick and you’re trying to pull out into a busy roundabout, let’s be honest, vehicles are operating in busy city centres or towns, pulling out from junctions with various loads on, and what the electric vehicle gives you is a point and shoot. You don’t have to worry about changing gears or being in the right gear - you can put both hands on the steering wheel and go, whereas in the diesel vehicle you’re having to do a number of things. You could be in the wrong gear for the weight in the back etc. That was the first thing and also, we drive more carefully in an electric vehicle because we’re conscious of preserving range, I think we’re more relaxed. A study was done on London taxi drivers that said they were happier, which is interesting, they were calmer and more focused on the wheel of an electric LEDC range extended electric vehicles. They were delivering a much better experience and so those are the main reasons I believe it’s safer to driver an electric vehicle.

Simon: The driver wellbeing is interesting – we’ve done a lot of work with CALM – van drivers are predominantly male, and CALM is aimed at preventing male suicide. It can be a very lonely existence - so making that environment nicer – and the electric vehicles are certainly pleasant places to be – so it’s probably an underestimated benefit.

Paul: I agree with you completely, CALM – the campaign against living miserably – I love that acronym. It’s such a ‘does what it says on the tin’ kind of description. I love that and the charity’s focus. When you think about the suicide rate of men it’s the biggest killer of men under 40 I think and men are our predominant driver population so the fact there are wellbeing benefits – it points to getting the drivers engaged early on in any approach we take to electric vehicles because they will understand the benefits.

Simon: The other point in terms of being safer to drive, when I spoke to Lorna who runs one of the biggest fleets in the UK, I’d expect her transition to electric vehicles to have seen possibly an increase in collisions as people go used to a new experience. Her experience was that people were more cautious and drove more safely and making sure that the charge lasted as long as possible they drove more safely, and her collision rate went down. Is that your experience?

Paul: Yes, what we know is that the vehicles are typically easier to drive, and drivers are calmer – that whole ecosystem works well. Insurers are even saying that you’re 25% less likely to be involved in an accident in an electric vehicle and this experience mirrors everything that Lorna has said. I wouldn’t disagree with any of it – it’s absolutely the case. Anybody I’ve come across driving electric vans are finding it a positive experience. But I will say getting the driver engaged in the first place will make or break that transition. We also hear stories when vehicles are demonstrated and drivers take them out into the big wide world, they are nervous – they say it doesn’t work – 1. Because it’s different, 2. Because they have to do things differently and charging becomes an issue because if you have only ever driven a petrol or diesel vehicle and you’ve only ever turned up at a petrol station to get your fuel, you may have never noticed the funny looking boxes with cables, that will power your vehicles, so you go into it with trepidation, so I think getting them onside in the first place is critical to a successful transition which will ultimately benefit the vehicle and the driver.

Simon: I know that some really big fleets are on their journey to complete electrification of their fleets by anywhere between 2025 and 2030 but it seems, there’s a lot of small businesses who don’t really know how to start. They maybe have a small fleet of diesel vans – what should they be thinking about – what are the challenges they need to think about now in order to transition as a smaller fleet to electric vans?

Paul: I think smaller fleets are slightly more challenged than the larger fleets as they tend to have predictable journeys and routes and mileage. They also have professional teams of fleet managers and probably experienced board members, finance execs, facilities people – all of those stakeholders who are needed for this transition. So, I think smaller businesses, if I take my own experience of stepping into business myself, there are a lot of questions you don’t know the answer to. There’s a lot of help out there – online and potentially people can come and talk you through the process, but you need to engage with a wider stakeholder base, starting by talking to landlords – you might say why? – but you talk to them because you need to think about charging. It’s the first thing to consider. You need to put in your own charging points, you’re not going to be reliant on the fuel station down the road. You will be putting in charging infrastructure in your own car park, premises – because we would want to be in maximum control of our own destiny when it comes to charging. Charging in the public domain at the moment is still somewhat of a concern because you can’t always guarantee you get on the charge points, and you can’t always guarantee they’re working. It’ s okay for most of the time, and it’s okay for a car – but when you’re in a van there are other challenges, so getting control of the charging experience is one of the first things you should do, almost before you think about vehicles. Can I charge whatever I buy? That’s the first question. Then you can start thinking about the vehicles and when you do, then it’s considering the data behind what you’re doing. I’m not a great fan of data, I’m a great fan of insight that data is essential for, but because I’m not a the most detailed of people I enjoy the opportunity to take data and then to turn out an answer than says these were the routes you have done, this is how many miles, this is where you’ve been and by the way if you put a charger here it would enable you to get additional charge in the place where the vehicles spend the most time. But whatever you do, it’s key to just get started, get demonstration vehicles, to engage your drivers, to find champions in your business who may be very positive about electric vehicles and will help you in your own transition because they’ve got a electric vehicle at home.

What we’ve seen from the big fleets there is a lot more people now that are van drivers, sparkies, electricians, chippies, that are working within big organisations like British Gas that can then share their experiences as well, so we’re seeing this cascade of experience coming into the van world, and more and more people are waking up to it.

Simon: It’s especially helpful to get as much information from as many people who have used electric vehicles as you can – help you understand to meet the challenges.

Are electric vans right for everything?

Paul: It’s a definite ‘no’ – whilst we have a lot for solutions for van users, many use cases are already very much sorted, but there are those when there is a real challenge. Towing in civils or construction is one case. If you’re using your van to move your diggers, that’s not going to be an ideal scenario because there is no electric vehicles that can tow considerable weight currently. By considerable I mean over 1500kgs. That means quite a lot of small business where they are multi using the vehicles – many times the vehicle goes out without towing, but it won’t do those critical jobs which means that you can’t really justify going to electric vehicle unless you take the blank canvas approach and get back to basics. How do I do my business? Is there another way that I can get that digger to the site or is there another way that I can do a particular job. Long trunking, if you’re doing 350 -400 miles in a day it wouldn’t be my recommendation to be thinking electric just yet, unless you have considerable amounts of time.

That said, with the public charging improving you can take time out of your day to have a break and you should be taking time out to do that, as I’m sure DfBB advocates, a decent break during the day – 45 mins – you could use that as your ideal charging time, and you would get certainly another 100 miles, because there are decent range vehicles on the market, but it’s not enough for some.

Simon: One of the things that Driving for better business espouses is better management of those that drive for work because of the benefits - understanding and managing those risks better - in a traditional vehicle those risks are predominantly the driver’s ability to check the vehicle and make sure its road worthy before they go out and then to competently use it in a safe manner, so with electric vehicles what are the differences as far as vehicle checks go and what driver training is needed to effectively use an electric vehicle?

Paul: In an electric vehicle it’s simply an ICE vehicle with the engine taken out and the fuel tank taken out and a motor put in and a battery put in – that’s basically the difference. Obviously there a few electrical bits and pieces that connect it all up and a charge point rather than a filler cap – so there are a lot of things around the van that are exactly the same. It’s very important to be still checking your tyres – arguably more so because your tyres are on vehicles that are typically higher powered than their ICE counterparts. Diesel vehicles don’t have the same amount of power delivery from the moment you put your foot in the accelerator. So tyres are an area for focus because there is a potential for higher tyre wear.

You would l check everything else – washer fluid, lights, glass, mirrors, make sure that you do all of the normal daily checks. You just don’t have to do the oil anymore which is a good thing, right? Your version of the oil check is to check you have enough range to do the day’s work. Making sure the vehicle is charged and you have your charging cable because if you go out and about there are some chargers – the rapid chargers – have fixed cables but if you turn up at a customer and you can charge there, you might need your cable. Making sure your charge port is not damaged – just making sure your vehicle can function while you’re out if you need to charge – those are the key things. Obviously, driver training – this is a fabulous opportunity to really engage the driver. They are approaching something they haven’t done before – a new way of doing things so this might be a time where your driver is more receptive to driver training and getting the best out of the vehicle. They know it all with a diesel vehicle but you put them in an environment where they are not quite so sure you can school them from the beginning and give them an opportunity to absorb better safer driving that is synonymous with electric driving.

Simon: Many fleets are used to telematics data from their fleet to determine driver training requirements. Does telematics still work in EVs, and do EVs have their own new data streams available? Do telematics systems still work with electric vehicles or do they have their own data?

Paul: The electric vehicles themselves are a little different than their internal combustion engine counterparts. They’re working on different protocols so whereas you could just plug in to the OBD and a lot of data would be taken from the vehicle, it’s not quite as easy anymore. For some reason the manufacturers have taken an opportunity because they don’t have to have an OBD they’ve taken the opportunity to do their own thing and go off piste if you like.

More reverse engineering has to happen and there is some incredible data you can take from electric vehicles around the battery – how it charges, whether it is charging and all of the usual driver behaviour type of things like hard acceleration, harsh braking, how they corner, all of that information is still there. What we do know is that manufacturers are keen to create their own data streams so they are looking at ways of putting it into the vehicle – certainly Ford are doing that currently. Mercedes have done it for some years now and it will be more important in electric vehicles as well. They are trying to take the data and sell it in a way to the wider market so broadly speaking, data is available, certainly for the driver behaviour piece, but it is different and there are things that are changing and I think the typical telematics providers will become data management companies. Taking the data from whatever source and then doing the science ion the data so they can produce the insight we need.

Simon: One of the things that is topical is the cost of fuel and energy, with fuel at record prices and cost of energy is going up from events around the world - how does that affect any financial decisions for a switch at the moment

Paul: You mentioned the EV Café earlier and we did a session when the price cap went up for domestic energy and all the noise, and the horrific world situation, and it’s a two pronged tragedy in that all prices are going up so everyone is affected at all levels at society so whether you’re in business or a private individual, you’re being affected by the increases in the cost of living. Fuel going up and electric going up means that the gap is still there and still significant. The gap when you’re paying for public charging verses fuel is narrowing but generally speaking, the cost per mile of fuel – electric vehicle vs diesel is definitely considerably less and makes that total cost of ownership argument still stack up broadly speaking.

I think the total cost of ownership is something people have to get their heads around. You’ll pay more in the short-term for the vehicle – that will change over the next 2 to 3 years potentially, but in the meantime what you’ll see is that the cost of energy will mitigate the overall cost of running that vehicle. Also, as we talked about the reduction in accidents, the driver wellbeing, I think people will be less off work – there’s a lot of soft benefits. The other key benefit when we think about total cost model – energy is going up as is fuel, the cost might be narrowing but the other benefit is down time. The scourge of every fleet manager – down time really impacts a business and can cost a business significantly. I was talking recently at an event and asked the question, what is the cost of downtime? Many times, even fleet managers don’t know, but one lady in the room said it costs me £300 per day for planned downtime and £1500 a day for unplanned downtime – so downtime has a significant cost. Averages can be £750 - £800 a day with much research behind that which is possibly surprising so when you can reduce downtime because the maintenance levels are much lower – the fact they don’t have an engine with just a few moving parts rather than thousands. This makes a massive difference in time and costs, so when you’ve got the whole cost of ownership not just focusing on fuel, it makes a really big difference to your cost model when you’re looking at an electric vehicle.

Simon: That’s an excellent way to finish our discussion – one of the key benefits off road time and down time is the biggest thing when I speak to fleet managers. A final question, What would be your first steps for any fleet managers or business owners looking to start their switch to electric vans

Paul: I would say that you could get a really good consultant, my website address is... just kidding. I would look around for help in your peer group first of all. The community of fleet managers and community around electric vehicles is a really friendly place. Once you’ve reached out and asked those questions, look at vehicles and get data on your journeys so you understand longest and shortest journeys so you have clear understanding of what your fleet does today, what it needs to do tomorrow and engage your drivers early on because they will be really good advocates. Then try some vehicles. Where possible try vehicles where you can also get a good experience on the charging, charging is key – making charging a part of the plan is essential and engage with the wider business to make sure you have all the stakeholders round the table and onboard. There’s a lot of insight and information out there on this transition and if you’re unsure – reach out to somebody that can give you advice, or maybe support you long term in that transition.

Simon – Excellent advice and I will put links ion the show notes to both the EV café and the EV Essentials website, and I guess anyone who would like more advice from you can get in touch with you via LinkedIn

Fascinating – thanks very much Paul

Simon: If you manage drivers and their vehicles and you face similar issues to those discussed in this podcast, there are links in the show notes to some useful resources on the Driving for Better Business website, and these are all free to access. If you enjoyed the conversation, please don't forget to hit subscribe so you know when the next episode is released, and please also give us a five star review as this helps us to get up the podcast rankings and makes it more visible to others who might also find it useful. You can follow us, that’s Driving for Better Business on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn, and most importantly please help us to spread the word. All our resources are free for those who manage fleets, and their employees who drive for work. Thank you for listening to Let's Talk Fleet Risk, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode.

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk – a podcast for those who manage drivers

and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.

My guest today is Lorna McAtear. Lorna is the fleet manager for National Grid – Hello Lorna and welcome to the podcast

Lorna: Thanks Simon. It’s great to be here.

Simon: Since we started this podcast last year Lorna you were one of the people I really wanted to talk to, but before I say why, could you start by just giving us a quick overview of the size of the National Grid fleet and the types of driving your staff are engaged in.

Lorna: I joined National Gird 2.5 years ago – we had 3000 vehicles on the fleet, 1700 company cars – only 7 were electric vehicles, so we’ve been on a massive transition through that. We have over 1000 commercials of which 350 are 4 x 4 and more recently, part way through last year we merged with WPD, so in total now we have 9000 vehicles, of which there are an awful lot more 4x4s and a few helicopters, so the transition is a large fleet now to manage.

Simon: We’re publishing this podcast in May 2022 and one of the reasons I wanted to have you on as a guest is that we’re putting the spotlight on sustainability. Driving for Better Business campaign is promoting a series of resources as well as case studies of fleets that have reduced fuel use and emissions – through either reduced mileage, more efficient driving or electrification of the fleet. You’re one of the best known advocates for electric vehicles and reducing emissions. National Grid as a company is aiming for Net Zero by 2050 – how does your fleet strategy fit into that?

Lorna: That was one of the first things I did – to design that fleet strategy and interestingly I was pushing the fleet strategy for a 2030 target when the legislations was for 2035 so there were a few challenges around why I was picking that date, but I think when you’re close to the marketplace you can see where the changes are coming in. I put together the plan for the next 10 years – knowing what I can control within in it. The 4x4s I mentioned, I know I can’t do anything about that. I can retrofit but there isn’t anything really, I can do for the vast majority on fleet, so it’s planning for a date in 2024 or 2025 knowing when the changes are going to happen. So, what I had to do is work with the enablers – what were the education programmes I needed to put in, that whole communication piece around it, which vehicles could I tackle immediately, which vehicles did I look at later – and just map put for everybody so we knew exactly when and where things were going to change. All I’m doing now as the years go by is sense checking into that original plan and working out whether I’m behind or ahead and is there anything else I can now do because of innovations that have come to market. Can I change some of my commercial vehicles earlier than I planned? There’s a whole raft of things that went into that but the key was having the plan in the first place and getting buy in.

Simon: Are you trying to replace the fleet vehicle sin line with your natural vehicle replacement cycle?

Lorna – Absolutely. You don’t need to get rid of the vehicles straight away. Just follow that replacement cycle so the whole plan was geared around that  we mapped out every single replacement ad some of them have got checkpoints on so the heavier the vehicle is or the more ancillary equipment it has, it just a checkpoint in time and it may be t at actually we extend that vehicle because the different vehicle will come out later, so each time I have a replacement it triggers a conscious decision on are we replacing, or are we intending  to do something different?

Simon – presumably helicopters present a challenge in their own right

Lorna – haven’t got a clue on that yet!

Simon: From a driver competence point of view, I had a week in one as part of a campaign we were running and there are some obvious differences, such as what you would check, and the driving characteristics – there are some obvious differences involved in driving an EV from the pre-use check angle as well as driving characteristics.

How does National Grid communicate these to drivers and how you liaise with colleagues responsible for driver safety on the training requirements for EVs?

Lorna: Stories are great aren’t they. The one thing is obvious is they are automatics. The first time I drove an electric personally was a Peugeot van and I nearly stuck my bosses head through the windscreen because I never driven a automatic before, so you learn from experience, and you can use those stories to relate to people. Its’s how you get that communication out there, and it’s how you normalize things. There are a lot of things we do with our ICE vehicles that don’t change even if you you’re in an EV. You’re still doing your normal drivers checks, tyres, make sure your windscreen wash levels are topped up, the FLOUR acronym, and we had some real challenges. Most of our EVs went onto the fleet during full lockdown during COVID so we had to do a lot of the driver education through peer to peer talks, through actually standing outside the vehicle and explaining things. There was a lot of online things because you’re right, understanding that regen you really can’t explain it to someone until they felt it themselves and they feel that vehicle so it’s just trying to work out pretty much with the whole sustainability plan what can you do, when can y you do it, which drivers adapt easily, some of the drivers already had EV cars so an EV van wasn’t a problem. So how do you identify your higher risk drivers and then make sure that each of the education pieces are there. What we did was a lot of hand holding to start with because it was new to us. It was new for us to educate others. We weren’t sure what education we needed. You’ve always got challenge – they can get uppity if you want to give them some education so it’s how you go about that.

Simon: How do you deal with an incident like a breakdown, or a collision – when things are different with an EV. Unless you’ve been told you might expect to be able to do certain things…

Lorna: Again. Some of that is already in our policy anyway, some of the base policies – fleet managers should check all the base policies and reinforce those because you’ll find an awful lot of it already covers those nuances between the EVs and you’re using breakdown providers, they know what they can and can’t do. So one of the things I did on that, when I was at Royal Mail and we’re doing it here – when we’re doing mass rollouts we notify the breakdown provider in that location so they can gear up to make sure that provision Is there. But what I am finding is that they don’t breakdown!

Simon: Well, that’s handy

Lorna: They’re far better – you have far less mechanical issues. Less moving parts, people drive them better, more cautious to start with as well, it’s quieter so the indirect benefits are people’s wellbeing. Drivers are less stressed out, the old fashioned ‘white van man’ goes, people are interested in how you’re looking after the environment, so the public perception is better for the drivers as well, all those things make for a better wellbeing type of environment, and it all comes into how they driver the vehicle.

Simon: I was wondering if you’d seen any changes in collision levels with the EVs? Are drivers more prone to collisions, maybe as they get used to the vehicles, or have you not seen a difference? Sounds like you’re not seeing that.

Lorna: We’re not seeing that at all. It helps that you can’t get a replacement EV so don’t damage it in the first place! We are seeing drivers look after those vehicles better so we are seeing less incidents. Don’ forget they come with a lot more safety features as well

Simon: They have pretty much a full suite of collision avoidance tech as a whole?

Lorna; Vans always used to be the poor relations to the cars, there’s a lot of that tech coming in now – blind spot indicators, a lot more coming in to the vans with the EV tech.

Simon: One of the primary challenges with electric vans has been reduced load carrying capacity due to the weight of the battery, which can lead to over loading. Has that been a problem for NG?

Lorna: No, because we before we put them in, we did that assessment of the specification and used it as an opportunity to reassess how you do the job. You’re not taking what you did before and just replicating it. You’re taking it as an opportunity to say what can I do differently. Can some of that kit come out because when you look at it you realise the kits has ended up in the vehicle over they years and it’s become habit. When you go into it you don’t need it – you find you’ve been hoarding stuff. So you just change the way of working and have a look at the vehicle and go back to basics. Because we knew we could not get EVs in the larger sizes when we first started, we looked at the vehicles and said – what do you actually need? If we put the ladders the site instead, can you reduce the weight? There was a lot of work in designing specifications first to make sure that everything came in as it should.

Simon: It’s a great lesson for any fleet – it illustrates the need for constant vigilance and management of what you’re doing, not letting bad habits getting ingrained, or adverse trends become the norm. You want to keep monitoring everything you do, and go back to basics to keep it fresh and ensures everybody is on top of their game

Lorna: We’ve done that with the recent highway code changes as well, so the legislation changes on the mobile phones, the access ways with pedestrians we did a huge internal campaign. Every change gives you an opportunity to go back and re-educate or reinforce some of your key messages. I know with the mobile phones changes, all we’re doing is reinforcing something we already had. Take very single change as an opportunity to just double check you’re up to speed . For example we did it recently, we had the mini fuel crisis, driver shortages, we dusted ff the business resilience plans and there was no provision in there for EVs and we had ramped up that fast, when the fuel was running short, we didn’t need to worry as much as we did before, because we had a lot of electric vehicles to use as shuttle vehicles or to do sme of the other jobs, we had different locations – so go and use their vans – so we ended up changing our business resilience plan to also factoring that we had EVs.

Simon: I watched the Transport session at COP26 in Glasgow last year where you were a panel member and you said you thought range anxiety had gone away, because the average range of an EV is now well over 200 miles, and the main concern now is charging anxiety. From a driver management perspective, any kind of anxiety can lead to a lack of concentration or distraction behind the wheel so does National Grid look at any of this from a driver wellbeing/confidence angle? How do you manage that? Have you go enough infrastructure.

Lorna: I think we have gone from range anxiety to charge anxiety and we’re now into a space where there almost an etiquette that needs to come in. There are so many more vehicles charging – you’re expected to move at 80% charge, but vans have less charge available to them and 90% is what’s needed for them to finish their job for the day and there’s an understanding creeping in. Car drivers – we are putting the infrastructure in and sorting out the depot charging for the commercial vehicles. We’re providing some charge point cards and we notify the drivers where there public charge points are, so we are trying to help them in the same way that we would with an ICE vehicle. A lot of stuff managing risk, anxiety, driver wellbeing are already there – they might need the odd tweak so it’s reinforcing it again.

Simon: You’ve still got a considerable number of ICE vehicles on fleet, petrol, diesel,  as you work towards net zero, so you do you do anything around helping drivers use those vehicles more efficiently.

Lorna: Yes, we always do things like that – reducing high risk levels, increasing compliance, reducing accident rates – you’re always education people on driving better so you’re always reminding them that heavy right foot – trying to get from A to B as fast as you can, especially when you get emergency callouts – it’s reminding people that you drive like that, it’s different between electric cars and vans and once they’ve learnt that, some of that actually creeps back into their vehicles when they’re driving the ICE vehicles. We are seeing natural transitions, but we still go out and remind people. We have safety briefings, we’ve trained over 10,000 drivers in road safety in 5 years, we’ve checked over 50,000 licence checks and we’re increasing that again so it’s a continuous piece of work that you cannot afford to stop doing because you ever quite know what’s next. We have got all of these fuel concerns going on so it’s going back and reminding people how to conserve your fuel. Every one mile an hour over affects your MPG.

Simon: DfBB is primarily about communicating the business benefits of good management practice, vehicles or drivers, so could you quantify some of the reductions you’ve achieved in fuel use and emissions as you near your net zero target?

Lorna: Some of the initial targets were just how many EVs – of the 1700 cars 700 are fully EV. October last year, was the first time the number of pure EVs was higher than the number of ICE cars so we had tipped the balance. We have a bunch of hybrids in the middle. I’ve got less than 400 ICE vehicles on the car fleet. In terms of the commercials, what we’ve seen in changes there, it comes back to the point, when you’re educating the drivers on fuel consumption and everything else you are seeing the numbers go down, how we measure some of it – our average co2 per km is 55g now, which is one of the lowest going, especially if you haven’t got pure EVs. We are seeing fuel, economy, emissions but I’m also seeing reduction in my incidents, the number of things happening and where the fault is changing in the right direction. That awareness level means people are much more conscious now of how they drive. They are in the public eye  more. If they burn that fuel they are damaging that air quality and that’s become something that people value.

Simon: More fuel-efficient driving tends to lead to safer driving – has this led to any reductions in collisions, or any other business efficiencies such as lower maintenance costs? You mentioned earlier less was going wrong. Less to spend on damage repairs? You’re seeing some string financial benefits and efficiency benefits?

Lorna: Yes – of course you use that at the beginning when you’re doing you’re total cost of ownership. We’ve all heard it – the upfront cost of these vehicles is more but if you use everything you said and factor that in your total cost of ownership very often is lower. The other thing we notice is that you can keep these vehicles longer if you chose to do so because there’s less to go wrong. The tech is there. You factor that into the total cost. Right now, personally, I would say it’s still a no brainer to go Electric Vehicles.

Simon: Excellent. Final question – What would be your advice to fleet managers, on where to start with the risk management, to other businesses who might be starting out on their net zero journey?

Lorna: I’m often asked this – and you talked about the risk management. You need to make sure you educate your drivers and you need to remember there’s an awful lot you’ve already got I place  so just go through your own policies and make tweaks to it. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel. For anyone who’s starting out, there are so many resources out there – National Highways have loads of resources – toolkits for drivers and risk so just take those resources and use them and adapt for your policies.

Simon: Lorna – I’ve really enjoyed that discussion thank you so much for being on the podcast

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/overcoming-the-hurdles-to-good-driver-safety-management

Tarmac Case Study https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/case-studies/business-champion/tarmac/

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk – a podcast for those who manage drivers

and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.

With me today is John Anderson. John is the National Logistics Director for Tarmac and manages one of the largest supply chains and fleets in the UK working across the rail, road and water sectors.

John, Tarmac operates a mix of vehicle types. To start with could you give us a breakdown on the size of fleet you operate, and the type of driving the business needs to manage

John: As market leaders in the construction industry, we manage materials supply. As a major supplier to the UK infrastructure, we manage a fleet of around 5000, half of those are large goods delivery vehicles but also 2500 are light commercial vehicles or cars and vans which our employees use to travel to and from their place of work.

Simon: That’s a complex fleet to manage. What have been your main challenges in identifying areas for improving driver safety and how have you met those?

John: We risk categorise each of those and we focus on the large goods vehicles. We cover in excess of 50 million miles per year making hundreds of thousands of deliveries per month. As such, these vehicles work on site, on the public highway, and offsite as well, so there’s a whole range of risks associated with this, not just the physical risks but also the behavioural and psychological risks around operating these vehicles. Our initial focus is around some of the generic issues – speeding, around harsh braking, control of the vehicle and we make sure that we are satisfied that the people operating these vehicles are competent to do so

Simon: Do you get any driver input into what the actual risks are with the different types of transport movements?

John: We do, we try and engage heavily with the drivers. I think this is a very valid point. Historically our engagement and involvement with the drivers tended to be around negative events, and I think it’s a real reflection and something that’s been part of the Driving for Better Business approach. Historically our involvement with drivers was a result of a negative event – an incident, an accident a road traffic collision or a speeding event, whereas now we are really broadening that, and I think it’s something that COVID has bought to the forefront. So, ‘hang on a second, these people do million of miles in their daily lives, representing our brand and delivering our products and are very much customer facing’ so we realise we have to engage with them. We make a conscious effort to engage in a positive way and make sure that communication is 2-way – so monthly newsletters for example, we really celebrate some of the small things these people do to deliver successfully and be part of our brand, and make sure that they have the ability as part of the delivery system to report good acts as well as negative acts – so near hits or near misses, they can submit that electronically from their vehicle and we look to give them recognition on the positive events as well. Drivers are on our health & safety committees and in our site liaison meetings. We involve them in the discussions and our plans and future thoughts.

Simon: So getting drivers to report near misses must have been quite a challenge. They have to feel they’re properly supported form the top, or else there’s a risk they feel they are reporting something that will get them into trouble. You must have done well with the driver culture to get them to feel comfortable reporting near misses – that’s great as it gives you more data to work on to make them safer.

John: I think you’re right. That’s a been a fantastic success. First of all we automated it – made it easy and initially we made them anonymous but actually we find people put their names, sites, locations and are proud to say they are part of that campaign. If they see something is not working, they step in and again no one wants a negative outcome. One of our key foci is whether they’re driving, in an office, on a machine or on a customer site and they see something that has potential to cause harm, they make a conscious decision to report it and I believe they now realise it makes them feel better about themselves and better about working for our organization.

But there’s no doubt it’s been a challenge and there’s no question that culture was there, but once you get over that it’s about the safety element and people’s wellbeing, I think that starts to gain traction and we see that grow every month. Then you make data driven decisions. Those data driven decisions make sure your strategy and your policy are heading in the right direction and aligned to where the real challenges are about people who drive for a living.

Simon: What’s the secret to communicating your key risks effectively with the drivers to try and achieve that?

John: I think if we go back to the year before COVID, 2 years before COVID, we had a big campaign where we went out, we had stickers, various giveaways for our hauliers and drivers and we went out to our sites and offices and spent time actually talking and listening – again it was trying to be proactive rather than reacting to a negative event. We launched it and advertised it and, in the end, people were nominating and requesting us to go to their sites to meet and talk about some of their concerns. People were very proud about some of the things they had done, the best practice, and they wanted to show it off and we encouraged the transport teams, the distribution teams, the depot & warehouse teams to get out there and talk to the people who are representing us every day, get on the front foot and listen to them and that really has driven that collaboration forward, and got them to a position where trust in the senior leadership team, in the people they deal with every day is important. We certainly would advocate the quickest way to build trust is to get in front of your people and talk to them – and listen That’s important. My motto is ‘you said, we did’ – it’s important that if we agree to do something we do it, and they can see that, so that certainly starts a journey and is something you can build on.

Simon: That’s obviously a good example of how you communicated to the drivers – there’s basically clear standards set that the drivers understand that they need to follow, they understand why, they’re trying to follow these standards and to maintain high levels of professionalism with their driving. You touched on the fact that it’s important to recognize the good. Can you give us examples of how you recognize good behaviour in practice, and how do you provide feedback when someone has fallen short?

John: We employ our own drivers, and we also have third party contractors so we engage with the key people in that organization as well as the individuals driving the vehicle. We do get regular reports from LinkedIn or Twitter, through communication, through social media channels and we make sure someone in a relatively senior position will pick up the good feedback and speak to the haulier and make sure they speak to the driver, Quite often, myself I will often drop that driver an email or a phone call to say we’ve had a report that you slowed down for some horses and we got really good feedback from those riders, ‘the Tarmac Trucker was the most considerate driver they’d passed’ – and that’s great feedback and we send that to the driver and the employer but also to the local site, and I think again trying to promote that local ownership and recognition that driver s representing them and the brand and who we are as a logistics function.

So some good opportunities to celebrate success there. There are small tangible things they get a body warmer or a fleece or a cap – just some small things.

On the negative side, we recognize people make mistakes or misjudgments, it is making sure we don’t overly penalize that but that people are aware they have gone wrong, why it’s important that they rectify that and we put measures in place that we’ve had that discussion, we’ve implemented that action. But it’s following up on it. We know that some of the biggest risks are when things are not followed up and it creeps up and becomes a repetitive event and that’s something we revisit with the help of some of our technology – and hopefully we prevent a recurrence.

Simon: With Tarmac being such a large organization and, with a supply chain working under the Tarmac banner that also contributes to a significant number of transport movements, I’m wondering how you ensure the various layers of management within Tarmac, and your suppliers, understand and meet the standards that you’ve set?

John:  Again, it is complex, there’s no question. We supply hundreds of different products in various vehicle types, and we manage that on a matrix style where you do thousands of different scenarios that you couldn’t possibly manage so it’s distilling that down to, ‘what of our standards do we really want to highlight?’ We know that key levers are key indicators to delivery, to safety, to behaviour, to wellbeing, we know those key levers and we make sure they are the things we are frequently asking our suppliers, our supply chain, our transport, and logistics management to be focused on. Once we know we have them distilled down and they know they are the key areas, and the other things that are important but we distill it down to a few key indicators – it’s probably a mistake that a lot of businesses make, they have far too many measures, and I deliberately say measures – you cannot have 50 key indicators.

I went to a meeting recently where somebody had 47 KPIs and you can’t possibly run a business with 47 KPIs – you can have hundreds of measures but what are your key performance criteria? We make sure our suppliers, partners, hauliers, drivers- they understand the 4 or 5 things that if they do these, the outcomes will be a continual improvement.

Simon: We’ve just published a new case study on some of the things you have done within Tarmac to manage driver safety – there’s more detail on what we are talking about here in the podcast. It shows how you have worked with your telematics partner, Masternaut, and how you used that data to deliver a really impressive 48% reduction on insurance claims in just 12 months. We are talking about data and a system like Masternaut gives you a huge amount of data to set baselines, identify trends, develop good tailored interventions and to track the performance – as you said there’s so much data available, how do you look at what are the most important metrics? Give us some of the other benefits you have achieved by focusing on the right metrics.

John: You’re right, as an organization of this size making so many vehicle journeys every day and every month, the data lake is absolutely colossal. You have to distill down to some key areas that we knew were going to reduce our collision rate. We knew we had problems with partners including our insurance but the Masternaut element really helped us to develop a dashboard – where are we with speeding? We had to reduce our speeding, especially in urban environments, we had locations geofenced, we knew who was speeding and when and why – which was important. We managed to reduce speeding by over 10% in that same period which really starts to drive down behaviour, but then there were things that people didn’t quite appreciate why we were focused on – idle time or site turnaround time and that was us getting behind the science of behavioral driving and we are into the fact about mood. Someone leaving our site, if they have sat in one of our sites waiting to load or waiting to be dispatched, the expectation is that we would turn them around and get them back on the highway in 15 to 20 minutes – obviously time is money and if they are sat there for an hour or 2 hours because we have run out of stock, frustration starts to creep in, time constraints start to creep in, so their mood and how they access the public highway where they can endanger other people, that mood and behaviour really came into focus. We achieved over an 8% reduction in site turnaround times.

Idle time – the time the vehicles are sat there being nonproductive but the engine going, it’s trying to profile these individuals and saying that’s costing fuel, and again its thinking about that whole continual improvement, professional drivers that can say ‘if I switch off my engine its better for the environment.’ Again, we saw a significant improvement in idle time and then again we could so some case studies on fuel cost savings to some of our large hauliers – that runs into thousands and thousands pounds a month, significant savings just by managing that idle time, but again it was conversations, coaching and providing some of that data to them.

I think that was the first one, and really using that data. At the same time, we invested heavily in camera technology, and we had a 50/50 bump for bump at fault insurance rate. The use of camera technology helped us to demonstrate that it wasn’t always our driver’s fault. We were able to demonstrate that by having camera technology – using that data and technology and embracing it to really continue on that journey.

Simon: With this dashboard that shows the data for all the drivers to your management team, you worked with Masternaut to create a management training programme to help them understand that data?

John: Yes, I think a lot of companies are blessed with a lot of data, and Tarmac is no different. We have so much it’s sometimes hard to say what are the things that are really going to move the dial for you – they have to be accessible and visible and user friendly and that’s something that we as a construction material company – we build great things, what we don’t do is turn data into true visible insight and I think there’s lessons there to say there are other people that are much better this than us, and using those contacts and the likes of Masternaut to develop that dashboard. The data is presented in a way that people can understand and interrogate it and use it effectively. We worked extensively with Masternaut and on a roll out programme – it’s working with the people face to face and also online to make sure those people are getting the best out of that technology and that data and insight and then putting that into action. That relationship has gone from strength to strength.

Simon: You manage such a complex set of risks – you need that outside help and obviously Masternaut provide that help with your data. What other outside help do you rely on to manage the risk?

John: Collaboration is something we all probably learn – as you go through your career, working with experts and partners, the learnings from Driving for Better Business, celebrating success by recording your case studies, working with universities and academics that really understand this stuff, you realise where your limitations are, and embracing those professionals that come from data driven, insurance companies, professionals in risk management that come and say ‘you’re focusing on the wrong things’, whether that be cars and trucks, your average car driver drives 20 miles a day from house to office, it’s important that they are well trained, you’ve got governance to check their licence and eye sight, however your trucks are doing ten times that, 200 miles a day they’re 40 tons – when a truck hits something, so really doing that professional risk management to gauge where you put your energy. You have to be able to prioritize that and use those external experts and that collaboration to help you towards your end goal.

Simon: What hurdles get in the way of good driver safety management – has there been any typical challenges that you faced that other driver risk managers might have faced as well – and how do you think driver safety managers can best deal with them?

John: I think that there are always hurdles, business priorities creep in and we are a multi-functional organization – operational teams, technical teams, distribution teams etc and they all have conflicting KPIs and conflicting priorities. I think the one thing that I am proud of and I do reiterate is part of that last mile – last mile logistics – road or rail or car and van – it plays a massive part and it normally is the customer facing piece and it’s the vehicle that leaves our site and has our final product on the back and it’s the person that turns up with a clean, compliant, legal driver and truck and represents our brand – it’s been a journey with conflicting priorities but the consistent message that we can make all the product in the world but if its sat in our site and doesn’t get to our customer – the end user – then we have not achieved our goal and certainly the revenues don’t come, so therefore when I am out with a driver or with a regional MD or a board member its really just making sure that they appreciate the value that our fleet and our drivers and our people bring to that, and I think people start to understand.

There are still some pockets where there’s a lack of awareness of that and we continue to strive to educate and inform just how important the haulage and distribution and transport and drivers are, and it’s something that has become publicly aware in the last few years – just that value – and I think more than ever we have to protect that value and make sure we look out for our drivers and our people. They have to feel part of our brand and our fabric, or the future will be a real challenge.

Simon: We’ve discussed the significant achievements including incident reduction and improvements in business performance and environmental improvements as well. To wrap up, what are the most important achievements to you and how do look to build on those in the future because risk management is a constantly evolving thing – a constant strive to improve?

John: It’s fantastic – something I’m really passionate about is data – we’ve talked about systems and technology, my key ambition now and I think it’s probably the biggest one for industry, and I talk to my colleagues across the mineral products industry, is joining that technology to make sure we recognize that predictability of some of these challenges we face with AI or embracing technology. What we are proud of – the Masternaut, the Michelin Connect, the telematics we have, a thing called One Card, where we’ve digitalized all our drivers records, we have no paper left – their competencies, their training, their experience the expiry of their CPD, that is all now digitalized on a virtual card, and is able to be validated at a point of entry into one of our sites, so that’s great. However, it’s still separate from our vehicles, and the next stage for us is really to join that technology together so that I know it’s John Anderson in our site, he’s waiting to load, he’s competent, but actually I also know that was John Anderson who was speeding 20 mins ago coming back from a delivery at a site and therefore I can intervene and he has to have a tutorial on speeding because that’s the third event etc – it’s really using the tech to our advantage to maximize the time we have with these individuals for continuing development and to automate it as much as possible. For all fleet managers, technology is out there. Some are further ahead but some are well behind but it think its about embracing that technology and making sure our suppliers are providing us with tech that is transferrable and can work with other parts because one thing we are seeing is that there is an awful lot of great stuff out there but it doesn’t communicate with each other and I think the people that can join the human being to the person to the asset to the behaviours and activities – that is the next big success and then act on on the insight and that will mean that people who come to work for anyone in a driving or construction or a vehicle – they come to work safely and they go home safely to their families at the end of the day.

Simon: Yes, and I think to have all that data together, you know what you need to do, you can show you have done it, and it’s peace of mind for all concerned.

John: Absolutely. We want people to represent our company and represent logistics across the UK – it’s a massive part of our being, and it’s so important that people are recognized and kept safe and protected and I think that technology and AI will help us on that next step of the journey

Simon: I mentioned earlier We’ve just published a new case study from Tarmac which details some of the achievements we’ve discussed, and the work you’ve done and that goes into detail on how you’ve achieved those benefits. We will put a link to that case study in the show notes so if anyone wants to read that they can see how you’ve gone about that

John, thanks very much it’s been a fascinating discussion.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/could-you-save-56k-with-a-road-safety-framework/

FM Conway Case Study https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/case-studies/business-champion/fm-conway/

Health & Safety Event – April https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/driver-safety-zone-2022/

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk – a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.

Hello and welcome to the March edition of Let’s Talk Fleet Risk.

With me today is Dave Conway who is the Integrated Management systems and road safety manager for FM Conway.

Hi Dave and welcome to the podcast

Dave: Hi Simon

Simon: That’s quite a mouthful for a job title – can you explain more about what that role entails and how you got into road safety for FM Conway.

Dave:  My role is to look after the business management systems of the company – I was looking after quality and environmental systems and somewhere along the way road safety systems came along as a certifiable framework standard.

I got involved and I became beyond passionate about it – it’s now a large part of my job and we changed my job title to reflect that.

Simon: So you’re not a fleet manager or driver manager – you’re all about setting up the systems and processes that manage that road risk.

Dave: Exactly that – and I’m a great believer in systemic solutions to most problems and safe system is the key particularly with road safety. That’s really where I come from. It does mean I actually have the advantage of being independent of transport and logistical operations which enables me to take a better view on how they are doing things and come at a problem with a different viewpoint without having to worry about normal business considerations.

Simon: Just give us an idea of the size of the fleet that Conway operates – and what sort of vehicles they are

Dave: These days I think our fleet – and it’s changed a lot over the past 2 years – is around 1100 vehicles, ranging from an HGV fleet of about 400 vehicles and those HGVs could be a low loader, an articulated loader or an articulated tanker vehicle right down to 4 wheeler and 6 wheeler tippers. We then have a fleet of about 550 vans and about 80 company cars or grey fleet – and by grey fleet I’m talking about cars that are privately owned but funded by the business to do mileage on behalf of work. So that’s the breakdown. It’s a little bit of everything. If it hasn’t got wings, we tend to drive it.

Simon: Because that’s such a mixed fleet, I guess there’s a number of different people within the organisation, the people who all have an impact on road safety – fleet managers, driver managers, operations managers, transport managers for the HGVs etc. How do you work with the fact that responsibility gets shared across so many job roles – how do you ensure that everyone understands what’s their responsibility is?

Dave: The whole point of the systems, the management systems is so that everyone can follow process and procedure, regardless of whether they are running a couple of lorries or running a patch up operation on a street somewhere in town, or whether they’re running bulkers around the M25 delivering aggregates or bitumen. If everyone is working to the same management system, we can ensure consistency in terms of our output and we can ensure everyone is following the same safety standards and doing the best we can – that’s the approach.

Simon: Was that challenging – to get everyone pulling in the same direction?

Dave: It’s not so much challenging to get them pulling – no-one gets up in the morning wanting to kill people on the roads or anywhere else. However, they have different priorities – they want to get their job done. They want to be as efficient as possible with their work and so on. So, the challenge is understanding their other priorities whilst getting them to follow road safety management systems. I think as long as you can be empathetic to their other issues you can deal with it – at the end of the day the best system is one that everybody wants to follow. If it’s easy to follow they will follow it so it has to be a system that is easy to follow and works for everybody.

Simon: And is that something you asked for feedback on when you were designing these systems? How important is it to get feedback from others in the company when you build these processes?

Dave: It’s imperative. You’ll have a framework for your standards, and you’ll know what has to be in there but when you’re going to work out how you’re going to do it the people who are expert in doing it – or perhaps in not doing it – are those people on the ground. It doesn’t matter if it’s a quality system or an environmental system you have to speak to the people doing the work and say “this is what we’re trying to do – how would you do it?” Then you can come to a consensus and find the best useable methodologies and put them in place – there’s no point in putting in place something that is not going to happen anyway.

If it needs to be policed, it’s not working. If it’s the right way to do it, they are going to do it because it makes sense without policing.

Simon: So, did you get driver input into those systems as well?

Dave: Essentially, throughout. When we started establishing our 39001 system, we set up a working group and to this day it’s in place – we have people from the board, from management and drivers – drivers and supervisors – and they all sit on this committee to make sure all of their thoughts are allowed for.

Simon: So, you mentioned ISO39001 and I know you’re a big advocate for that. Why did you choose that as standard that Conway was going to embed in the business?

Dave: ISO390001 is a management system framework standard for road traffic safety. It’s been our experience and indeed the world’s experience that certified management systems work. They make a difference, there are demonstrable benefits for everybody and very few downsides.

How we got into it – it’s an interesting story. We received a letter back in 2012, Transport for London were one of our key customers and we received a letter from Sir Peter Hendy CBE who was the commissioner for Transport for London. He had commissioned a piece of research by the Transport Research Laboratory into why cycle crashes in London seemed to be dominated by construction industry vehicles. He sent us this 700-page report and it came up with a number of recommendations – and we were asked to support the recommendations. One of those was adopting a formal framework management system for your transport operations such as ISO 39001 and that was the point we embraced it.

I hadn’t heard of it – so I went and bought the book, and we did it – not realising that we would be the first. I’d spent most of my working life railing against some aspects of health and safety saying ‘why were we so worried about some aspects at work when you were more likely to die driving for work or driving to and from work?’ and all of a sudden here was a system that was supporting everything that I was saying and I embraced it with a passion – and here I am still doing that.

Simon: You were one of the first business to get ISO39001 accreditation and you did it 2012 – obviously you’ve had that in the business for close to 10 years now – so what has been the benefits to FM Conway that you can categorically say – that’s because we had that management system in place

Dave: I am always mindful of the fact that if you are going to persuade a business to adopt these systems there needs to be a business case. I really can’t overstate the business case. Within the first year of adopting the system, we found ourselves with a £56,000 reduction in our fleet insurance premium. That sum of money paid the certification for 39001 for the next 7 years. There’s your business case – if you’re running a system like that you will have less accidents. You will have less crashes, less injuries, less costs on maintenance, you’ll find that your drivers drive better and if they drive better there’s less wear and tear and less fuel usage. From a business point of view – absolutely amazing it will make money – simple as that. It will not cost you money.

There are a lot of road safety systems out there and I’m not going to quote other systems, but I can tell you from experience they will cost a small fortune. I speak to a lot of people in business, and they say we don’t have enough budget as we are a member of this other scheme and it costs us so much we can’t afford training let alone anything else.

39001 will not cost you money. Yes, there will be some costs, but I promise you you’ll get every penny back through business improvements and that’s the fundamental reason for having a system like that.

Simon: What types of vehicles you run and the number you’ve got – it’s a sizeable mixed fleet. What are the challenges in running that fleet that you think your management standards help with. If you’re not running a management standard like that what are the sorts of issues a business is going to come up against and find it difficult to manage?

Dave: With this system our biggest challenge is the drivers don’t consider themselves drivers. We have a large number of HGV drivers that we call professional drivers – these are the guys if you meet them for a drink, meet them in the street, they say ‘I am a driver’. They take a pride in that profession – ‘I’m a good driver – and I haven’t had a crash for 33 years’,they take a pride in that. What you also have is a large number of drivers who think of themselves as bricklayers, or asphalters or ground workers, who actually have a vehicle and they drive to and from work every day and at work. They may be moving themselves, their colleagues, some machines or some tools or some materials – but you ask them what they do for a living and they don’t even think about driving. They’ll take pride in their work, but they will forget about being a driver and the challenge for us is to make those guys appreciate that driving is an important part of their work and the job and they should take as much pride in being crash-free as their professional driver colleagues.

That’s the challenge – it’s one we are still working on and we are still striving to get – and we are getting better by having a management system in place as it enables them to see the successes of the professional drivers and it gives them something to embrace and be involved in as well because when you get the certification you can take the pride, and we all get it, even the pedestrians.

Simon: What have you done within the business to try and encourage that culture of professionalism among the van drivers? How do you get them to view themselves and their driving as a professional element of their role?

Dave: I think primarily it is through our certification that we can spread that pride. Internally we have some pretty good marketing approaches, we have good communication channels and every time we do something in respect of road safety we publish it.

We win awards we get prizes and so on, and we boast about them to try and encourage that sense of pride among all employees. We also have a few processes in place – stick and carrot – stick processes to maintain the standards but we much prefer using the carrot approach – we take some pride in this and I like to think that FM Conway are internationally recognised these days for the standards we set with road safety. I’ve had people come to us from South Africa to see how we do it, from Australia, New Zealand and that’s not bad going for a small private family owned business.

Simon: How do you recognise drivers – the carrot bit?

Dave: Professional drivers – it’s quite easy, we actually have a scheme we introduced several years ago. We call it the Gold Hat. When a driver reaches a certain standard, having gone so many hours without any incidents, vehicle has to be clean, they need recommendations from whoever they deliver to, they have to do a certain amount of training and they work up from a bronze to a silver to a gold hat – they get given an actual helmet in that colour which they can where in pride when they arrive on site.

Of course, you turn up and get out of your lorry with a gold helmet and everyone takes the mickey until you respectively remind them there is a very significant salary increase. Tis salary increase is self-funding – that’s the nice thing about it. We pay them more money and the scheme is self-funding because we are saving this money by not having the incidents, by having the better miles per gallon and so on. Like all good intiiatives they fund themselves.

Simon: It sounds funny and worth making a joke about but actually the ones who haven’t got the gold hat want the gold hat.

Dave: Exactly as I say it gives the guys something to take some pride in

Simon: I think that’s a key lesson for anyone trying to improve a driver culture. Better to encourage them with a carrot approach than using a stick all the time.

Dave: Totally, if you nag and poke and prod all the time, people just turn off an get worse. We found certainly with the [professional drivers, that encouragement, reward and respect make the difference. It is much harder to do with van drivers and we to have to focus a bit more on the stick, but we try to do it in a positive way and one of the things we’ve introduced is the Samsara System. It’s a live link with a telematics system that has cameras in and outward facing, there some artificial intelligence involved with the cameras so if the camera detects you are using your phone or you haven’t got your seatbelt on it sends an immediate alert to the line manager literally instantly – who can then yell through the system back to the driver  “Put your seatbelt on!”

We don’t want that to be a stick, but we know the drivers know that they are being watched. Unfortunately, there will be a few people who don’t like that but those are probably the people that are of most concern.

Simon: That leads me nicely onto data – you need data to run a driver recognition scheme to know if they’re improving or need interventions. You’ve plainly got a lot of data coming from your systems. How do you manage that?

Dave; Monitoring and measuring is a fundamental requirement of any management system and we are required to do it for road safety in a positive way. So we are trying to find the good in things. We do have data logging over speeding events, harsh braking events, the system keeps track on it. We try to keep positive about it. We use it as an opportunity to talk to the drivers about their issues.

We’ve got initiatives we’ve introduced. Our E training system – e learning for drivers – and everybody who drives for us must undertake an online driver risk profiling exercise. It’s based loosely on the advanced driving test. Everyone who drives for the company, company, or grey fleet, we all have to do this driver risk profiling. It takes about 20 minutes, and it identifies those areas where you are more at risk than others.

You can come through with a set of green lights, or it might identify that you have a weakness in hazard perception or a weakness in your technical knowledge and as a result of identifying that, the system will then assign you online e-modules to undertake. So, from there we can actually focus the training on the driver’s shortcomings, and we then do a short test to check they have met the standards.

They have to repeat if they haven’t. All our drivers do that every year, so we are able to track that they are doing it and getting the training and we are also able to track their scores year on year are better. That’s the most important thing. What we are looking to do as this Samsara System takes off – and this is a wish at the moment – is identifying those people who have ongoing speeding issues. We all do it, I’ve been there, and I can remember doing a speed awareness course, and having done that I think it’s fair to say it was 8 or 9 months before I had a speeding situation again, and the courses are great but they wear off. Eventually the urgency of the situation becomes stronger in your mind than your memory of that course, and what we are trying to do at the moment is establish who the common speeders are and develop either e-training or virtual reality training modules that are equivalent to a speed awareness course and put our drivers on that so that  we can tackle them before they have to go through legal process. It’s just trying to be a step ahead of the game. We are working on that at the moment.

Simon: With the driver profiling or risk assessment what’s been the driver response?

Dave: The way of the world is that all people understand they have to do occasional mandatory training. Without mentioning other systems out there, we are all aware of the most commonly used fleet management service and that has e-learning within it and drivers are required to do 2 modules a year. We found the drivers are doing the same 2 every year because they knew all the answers and could whizz through it in 2 minutes! – to be fair there’s always resistance to having to do a bit of training but people who have done the training come away from it and say – ‘actually that’s pretty good and I learned something there.’ That’s why you did that training because the system had determined that you didn’t know it and that’s’ why we’d given it to you. There are positives, there’s no more resistance to that method of e-training than any other e-training they’d ever have to do.

Simon: You talked about your professional driver recognition scheme – what other interventions or initiatives have you got or are working on to improve driver safety?

Dave: The big on at the moment alongside the Samsara system is for the professional fleet – the big trucks – we’ve had sensors on the vehicle to detect objects on the near side and far side, the blind spots and so on and we’ve had sensors fitted for some time, and what we found, certainly through an urban environment there were so many objects setting these sensors off it was not unknown for drivers to disable the system. Now I have to make it clear if we ever caught a driver disabling it we would have to have a serious word.

We know and understand this was happening because you could drive down a crowded high street and this bleeper would go off every 3 seconds so what we did – we worked hand in hand with a company called Brigade and they had a couple of our trucks and they installed computer servers in the passenger seats to gather data. They have now developed with us and are selling a system we are putting on all our trucks which is intelligent sensing. They will look at any object that is moving within the vicinity of the truck and extrapolate the route that object is going and the route we are going and if they detect a potential collision it will slam the vehicle’s brakes on. That’s going to make an enormous difference. We think that’s incredible technology and we’re very proud to be involved with it.

Simon: That sounds like a really good initiative. One of the problems with some technology is it can false alarm or trigger a number of times when it’s not necessary and that damages the driver’s trust in the system. Potentially encourages them to turn it iff. For you to develop a more intelligent system means it’s always on and there when its needed

Dave: Exactly – we’re very proud of that. We’ve developed auto stop – using it on site rather on the highway currently but for example our sweepers are all fitted with auto-stops so if an object walks behind a reversing sweeper, it will slam the brakes on, if someone moves at the back of that loading shovel the brakes are slammed on. We’re looking at how you can operate it sensibly and safely on road transport – you have to be very, very careful, you can’t just have it slamming the brakes on a truck every 10 secs – but it’s another initiative that has a lot of mileage in it.

Simon: We talked briefly about the massive insurance reduction that you had and that’s a key element in the business case for doing this, but are there any other key benefits you’ve seen as a business?

Dave: The most significant is just the sheer reduction in crashes and injuries. We monitored it – it’s one of our regular things we have to measure as part of 39001 system – and there’s no doubt that since we introduced the system the number of incidents plummeted and the number of incidents involving injury plummeted. That’s the key factor. We had a 2 year plateau at one point where we identified we had stopped improving and we looked long and hard as to why that was. We found the solutions and implemented them and continued the downward trend. In those specs that’s the big benefit. If you’re drivers are driving safely, if they have a sense iof pride that they are driving safely, then you’ll find you get the benefits in terms of costs of maintenance of that fleet as well. Our maintenance costs actually went down even though we were doing more of it. It sounds paradoxical. Because we became systemic and more controlled in our maintenance approach we found that each time it went in for maintenance there was less work to do than if you did it on an ad hoc basis.

Simon: That makes a huge difference at the end of the vehicle’s life as well – life maintenance costs are much lower…

Dave: There has to be a business case. We all take safety very, very seriously but at the end of the day if you run a business that is extremely safe, healthy but losing money the business won’t survive. There must be a sound business case for it.

Simon: You’ve got a case study on our driving for better business website which outlines that as well and the business benefits so I’ll put that in the show notes.  The final point I wanted to talk about was FM Conway’s headquartered in Kent and a lot of your work is done in Kent. You take road safety seriously as the whole company. How important is the reputation for  a business like yours within your local area of being a responsible transport operator.

Dave: We see ourselves as part of Kent. A very large number of our employees are residents and rate payers of Kent and we feel like we’re really involved with Kent. With corporate social responsibility and requirements, we try and support the local economy. We give work to local businesses where we can, we buy from local suppliers, and at the same time, we want to look after our colleagues, friends and our neighbours in our own county. I’m a Kent rate payer. I live in Maidstone, and I have a family and I want to know my family can go out on the roads of Kent and come home safely each day. So, it’s important to me, to all of us – Kent’s our home and we’re proud to be part of it.

Simon: Reputation is something that should concern any business especially a business like yours where you have the name plastered down the side of your vehicles – it makes a huge difference. It doesn’t take much for that reputation to be tarnished, does it?

Dave: Exactly – I had a meeting in the office the other day and we were talking about exactly that – and as I said earlier I’m very proud of the reputation Conway’s have got in terms of road traffic safety – we are internationally known for it. That puts us on a pedestal and that means we have to work that little bit harder and I’m proud to do that – it gives us the motivation and incentive.

Simon; That’s really excellent and I can see that’s paid dividends for you throughout the business. It does focus everybody’s mind.  Dave, that’s been a fascinating conversation Thanks very much.

If anyone would like to quiz you or hear a little bit more you’re going to be on a panel discussion we are running at the Health and Safety Event in Birmingham at the NEC from 5th to 7th April. The panel discussion is ‘Good practice in driver safety management’ and it starts at 10.20am on the 7th April so if anyone would like to come along and hear you and a number of other driver safety managers talk about the good practice they do and how they meet the challenges I think you’ll find it a worthwhile discussion to attend. It’s in the DfBB Driver Safety Zone and there’s a link in the show notes.

Dave, thanks you very much for your time. It’s been fascinating and we really appreciate you taking the time.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/van-safety-ratings-how-safe-are-your-vans/

Thatcham Research: https://www.thatcham.org/   Euro NCAP Commercial Van Safety Ratings https://www.euroncap.com/en/ratings-rewards/commercial-van-ratings/   Commercial Van Safety Ratings 2020 https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/articles/how-safe-are-your-vans/

New Van Safety Ratings - how safe are your vans? https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/articles/van-safety-ratings-how-safe-are-your-vans/

Simon: Hello and welcome to the February edition of let’s talk fleet risk which, this month, is all about Advanced Driver Safety Systems, or ADAS for short.

ADAS covers all the collision avoidance systems and driver assistance technology that can help avoid a collision or minimise the severity in the event it can’t be avoided altogether. It’s a subject I’m personally fascinated by, and I’ve monitored how these systems have developed over recent years.

With me today is Matthew Avery who is the Chief Research Strategy Officer for Thatcham Research.

Hi Matthew and welcome to the podcast

Matthew: Hi Simon

Simon: Matthew – perhaps you could start by giving us a brief introduction as to why ADAS is important, how Thatcham is involved, and what your role is?

Matthew: Sure – Thatcham is a not-for-profit UK Insurance research centre and we’re members of Euro NCAP – I’m sure many of the listeners will know Euro NCAP – it’s 25 years old now and has been leading the charge to getting information to the consumer for them to buy a safer vehicle.

Since about 2014 we have really pushed the fitting of advanced driver assistance systems that help avoid the collision in the first place, and we’ve moved on from crash testing to seatbelts and airbags and the ability to avoid having the collision in the first place.

Vehicle manufacturers have been fitting technology – cameras and radars – on vehicles to detect what’s around them, respond to a potential collision threat by automatically putting brakes on and steering away from the collision. It’s very effective technology and we’re seeing it really working. We’ve now got a huge amount of standard fit in AEB technology and its reducing crashes by about 35% so it’s really good technology. It’s there not only to protect yourself but it’s also there to protect other road users and vulnerable road users. These systems will detect cyclists and pedestrians and other vehicles and [preventing a life-threatening collision. We saw this technology working so we began to broaden our scope in 2018 and looking at other vehicle types. Thatcham undertook research which showed the huge void there is between passenger cars and vans. We have a huge amount of standard fit on passenger cars – and vans from the same manufacturer have almost no technology fitted at all.

A good example is Nissan – we looked at the Nissan Duke and that has standard fit lane support systems, advanced driver systems, radars, speed limiters. Great technology – a 5-star car. When we look at the NV400 which is the Interstar at the same sort of price – absolutely no technology available at all, not even as an option and we thought there’s no reason for a manufacturer who makes the equipment, not doing that.

So, we started our first ratings in 2020 of commercial vans to highlight to the public and to fleet operators, to owner drivers and to large fleets – you must have this technology fitted. You have it on your cars, you should have it on your vans – where much of it is simply not available, choose another van. Where it is available as a cost option make sure that as an operator, you’re ticking those boxes to protect you and your driver and your brand.

Simon: So, I wanted to talk specifically today about ADAS on Vans. ADAS on cars has been developing quickly for over a decade now and we’ve reached a point where there are some fairly advanced systems available, and in order to score highly on the Euro NCAP safety ratings, most cars now have many of these systems fitted as standard. But that isn’t the case with vans, which have been much slower to adopt the technology – why is that? Why don’t they put that ADAS technology onto the vans?

Matthew: We think most of it is just down to consumer pressure and economics – manufacturers understand the power of the NCAP 5-star rating – and if you do not have 5 stars or 4 stars, you’re unlikely to appeal to a broad market. We see that with vehicle manufacturers, so they strive to get the 5-star rating, whether that’s Renault or Volvo or Mercedes Benz. Every manufacturer strives for the 5-star rating.

But as there wasn’t a similar rating for commercial vans, there’s only the regulations which did not require any ADAS fitting so manufacturers are thinking why do I need to fit it? If I can make my van cheaper and more competitive then I will do that. Some broke the mould – Mercedes was producing a lot of optional equipment and VW on their Transporter range was beginning to fit AEB as standard and we saw a market drive for that. Hence the need for the ratings to tell the consumer which van to buy.

Simon: You’ve been working with Euro NCAP to create this new safety rating system for vans so users can clearly see what systems are available and how good they are. In December 2020 you released the first set of results from tests on 19 common models of van in the UK – what did you find?

Matthew: We were shocked by what we found. Most ADAS systems aren’t fitted as standard – VW were fitting some of it as standard – but most of it including the best-selling van in the UK – Ford Transit Custom – just had none of this equipment as standard.

Some manufacturers were fitting it as an option, but there were quite a lot who weren’t even doing that – I mentioned Nissan – so we tested 19 vans and obviously a lot of these are shared – so Stellantis badge the same van in different markets, whether it’s a Fiat or a Peugeot or a Citroen, but it’s essentially the same van off the same production line.

We decided to rate in separate categories, so we have a platinum rating and there no platinum ratings, then gold – and then silver and bronze and then a not-recommended and there were too many vans that were simply not recommended. That was our first set of ratings and best performers were VW and from Ford with their large transit and the Mercedes Sprinter – those were our best performers then, but we were hoping we would see some manufacturers rising to the challenge, and this year we have.

Simon: What was the response from the vehicle manufacturers and fleet managers to those results?

Matthew: It was mixed. Vehicle manufacturers recognised this – they said we are making the right plans for the customers, and therefore there is not so much of a requirement from customers to buy this and can we really afford to make our van less competitive than another van by putting this safety equipment on?

When we talked to them, they said ‘we do have this technology – and we could fit it if there was a demand.’ We see Euro NCAP driving the demand – so the message to the fleet operators is you can’t afford to not have your vehicles on the road earning money and even after a minor collision they could be off the road being repaired – and the potential injuries for your drivers – and think about your brand reputation as well. Nobody wants to see a sign written van involved in a collision on Facebook or Twitter, so there’s lots of reason why you should be buying a van with this equipment. Our ratings make the choice clear – buy this van with this equipment and you’ve got the safest van on the market.

Simon: What’s the thinking behind the different type of safety rating to the cars – the Euro NCAP car ratings 5 star is the top whereas with the vans you’ve opted for bronze, silver, gold, platinum…

Matthew: There’s a couple of things – we wanted to separate it. We got a different message to a different audience. It’s a B2B message – we are trying to talk to fleet operators and owner drivers and they’ve probably, on their drive, they’ve got a 5 star Euro NCAP vehicle to protect themselves and their families – do they do that for their drivers?

So we’re talking to a different audience and we wanted to separate it. The other thing is this is a series of tests that we will change every couple of years so we will continue to raise the barrier and also we wanted to see this as a badge of honour so we’ve been engaging with a lot of traffic authorities like Transport for London and National Highways to inform them – they have the power to encourage the users of the roads to be driving safer vehicles so maybe you could say that we don’t want you to drive in London unless you’ve got a vehicle of a certain safety rating. Maybe you would be more likely to get a delivery contract if you have vehicles that are safer – if they’re Gold and not Bronze, you could be more likely to get that contract. We are trying to encourage a new audience to understand the benefits of driving safer vehicles.

Simon: That’s something that Driving for Better Business encourages – in one of your previous answers you mentioned about the time the vehicle is off road if there’s been an incident – while it’s repaired – and from the conversations I have with fleet managers that is one of the biggest costs / risks to the business. You can’t do business if your fleet is off the road being repaired so it’s really important that they look at this technology as it removes one of the key risks involved in running a fleet.

Matthew: That’s right and you also have to think of the driver who is injured in the incident. Hopefully they recover but they are probably not signing up to work and we know there’s a lack of delivery drivers, especially around HGVs and we understand that one of your best assets is your driver so you should be protecting that driver.

Recruiting is not so easy, so if you have safer vehicles and you’re making a point of saying – look, come and work for us because we have the safest vehicles on the market that could attract them.

What we are trying to do is make the information available A lot of fleet managers say they don’t know what to choose – manufacturers trying to flog stuff ‘but I don’t know if I need all the stuff’ so we’re helping them make that choice by saying these are the technologies that make a difference, that improve the safety of the vehicles. Why not talk to your insurer – does that mean your fleet premiums are reduced? Worth talking to them as well.

Simon: What are the technologies – what are some of the most common you want to see adopted?

Matthew: The most important is AEB – autonomous emergency braking – using a radar or a camera or a combination of both using a concept called sensor fusion to identify if the driver is responding and if they don’t put the brakes on automatically, so stopping front into rear crashes – the most common urban crashes. It also prevents accidents with pedestrians and cyclists as well. AEB is one of the most important technologies.

The second most important is probably out of lane support systems – a lot of crashes occur because drivers are momentarily distracted and their vehicle crosses over a white line either into another car or runs into a tree or crosses over the centre line – all crashes you want to avoid so we look at lane support technologies, as well as simple seat belt reminder warnings. Very powerful encouragement to put a safety belt on. Too many commercial vehicle drivers are not wearing safety belt even though it’s a legal requirement.

Also, things like speed limiters – a lot of people see this as big brother controlling your speed but it’s also extremely helpful. People really see the benefit of controlling their speed. Having a reminder to tell you this is a 30, 40 or 50 speed limit. Most of us want to stick to the speed limits and having a reminder is really helpful. It helps you keep a clean licence as well.

Simon: I sometimes hear people being a bit disparaging of these systems, probably through lack of understanding that drivers can get lazy, and complacency sets in. Is that a valid concern?

Matthew: Probably but we don’t see it in the statistics. When we look at the efficacy of these systems in the market, vehicles that have this technology have fewer crashes than those that don’t. Period. So why wouldn’t you want this technology?

Simon: So, the reason we’re talking today is that you’re about to release the second set of results for the van tests. Have things improved?

Matthew: Yes, they have. I’m pleased to say Simon, they have improved. Probably the standout star is the Fiat Ducato. That is the very first platinum rated van. That is the safest van that we’ve ever tested – it’s a fairly regular van – not high end – but we’re very pleased that Fiat have made the provision to put the technology on the vehicle. It doesn’t come as standard, you have to tick the box, but at least the Stellantis Group that own Fiat are making that technology available. So that’s the first platinum rated van.

We also see some movement on the Ford Transit Custom – the UK’s best-selling van has got a gold rating – it was silver before – and really, the most disappointing is probably Nissan with their Interstar – which was formerly the NV400 which was our worst performer and gets a ‘not recommended’ rating. Nissan doesn’t even see fit to fit the technology as an option. If you check their equivalent price passenger cars like a Duke or a Qashqai, they have the technology as standard. We voted the Qashqai the ‘What Car’ safety car of the year because it had so much good technology in a value package. So, Nissan know how to do this, but when it comes to vans, they seem to ignore the customer so I suggest maybe van operators might want to look elsewhere.

Simon: You mentioned that a lot of the vans in previous years tests, similar to what you said about Nissan – the technology wasn’t even available as an option. You tested 19 vans last year – have you seen that manufacturers are more willing to offer this technology now?

Matthew: Yes – we’re seeing Renault and Ford using more technology and their ratings increasing so our first step is to make the technology available and a sneak peak on our next ratings – we will be putting our requirements even higher and will be expecting manufacturers to fit a lot of this technology as standard. We will continue to raise the bar and encourage fitting as standard as they do for passenger cars.

Very good ratings so far and we’re pleased to see a significant increase especially as van sales continue to rise. Let’s see a corresponding rise in the safety ratings of those vans. The manufacturers are on notice that we will expect to see the technology flitted as standard in the future.

Simon: What about the different technologies themselves? Do you see variations on the capabilities in an AEB system or a lane keeping system across different manufacturers for example?

Matthew: Yes, we see some differences. The Fiat Ducato’s AEB system was very good for cyclists, pedestrians, car to car, whereas some of the other systems such as Renault are less sensitive – they work with cars but not always pedestrians and cyclists so we do see some differences in performance and that’s why it is so important that we have these grades. It’s not a tick box – you either have AEB or not – it’s also how good is the system.

One of the most important technologies we are beginning to see fitted would be the Drive monitoring systems. Again, it sounds like spies in the cab but this technology, which is very new even to passenger cars, we are not seeing on vans yet – but it’s monitoring the drivers status to makes sure the driver is not drowsy and whether the driver is paying attention. There’s an awful lot for a van driver to do now. They have very quick turn round between drops and its all too easy to be distracted looking at mobile phones to see where your next drop is, so that technology which brings the drivers eyes back to the road all the time is vitally important to increase safety.

Simon: You mentioned about fleet managers to take these safety systems into consideration when they are acquiring their vans, I guess whether they are leasing or buying. One of the things we want to do is to encourage much wider fit across vans as that then helps the technology to filter through to the secondhand market. That technology then becomes available to others. What should fleet managers be saying to their leasing companies or manufacturers to encourage this to be fitted as standard or at a lower cost? Can fleet managers put pressure on the manufacturers to work harder at this?

Matthew: I think fleet managers have a role to play. If you’re looking at a new fleet of vans you can look at some of the brands like VW who are fitting this technology as standard and make a choice there as opposed to other brands. I would urge fleet managers to look at our ratings. If you want a standard fit system, then some manufacturers are making vans with standard tech, and I think that a fleet manager making the point that ‘we’ve decided on these new vans for our fleets because they tick all the boxes because we want a safe fleet’ – that’s making a very important statement. Manufacturers understand the power of that, and their product can continue to be competitive so I think there is a huge bargaining case that fleet operators can make – and the fleet managers – in saying ‘I am not buying your vehicles unless you put this equipment on, and you make it standard.’

Simon: One of the things I noticed from the results this year as well as last year, there’s a huge spread from top to bottom – they do seem to have shifted slightly further upwards as we have our first platinum van, and in the previous results there were 5 ‘not recommended’, but there’s only one this year. There’s still some improvement, but that huge spread of results is still a concern isn’t it. Do you expect the rest of the manufacturers top follow Fiat’s lead and put some more effort into this now?

Matthew: Yes, we would. As you said, we have one coveted Platinum manufactured, 7 Silver, 6 Bronze and 4 Golds so manufacturers are beginning to respond. One of the things behind this is that there is a new European regulation called the General Safety Regulation – GSR2 – that stipulates new vans going on sale this year will have to have some of this technology fitted as standard, so a European directive is forcing manufacturers to do this and by 2024 all manufacturers will have to fit some of this technology.

So you might ask why we are doing what we are doing. Any regulation like that tends to work at a fairly low level so while manufacturers will be forced to fit the tech it won’t be a high performing system so what we will be moving towards once we get manufacturers engaged is making it standard fit and then really pushing the performance to avoid manufacturers just fitting the minimum requirements to pass the regulation – actually fitting high performing systems. You won’t get Gold or Platinum unless you’ve got a system that way outperforms the regulatory requirements plus there are several things in our ratings that aren’t yet required in the regulations, so we are going as ever above and beyond where the regulations lie – even in 2025.

Simon: Fantastic. We are publishing this podcast just after the official test results are released so where can our listeners go to find out more about the test results and see where the vans they commonly purchase sit in that league table?

Matthew: Euroncap.com – they can see all the ratings there. You can find a link to that on the Thatcham Research website. The other useful provision on the EuroNCAP website is you can drill down into that and it will show you the availability on each market so we cover EU27 plus 1 now and we show the ratings across all of the EU states. You’ll be able to look at the UK and say what’s available on our van because it is different between countries. And we do have a reasonably high level in the UK and we’re much better than say France or Italy – so it’s doubly impressive that Fiat have decided to make this equipment available as an optional fit – and I would urge people to look at a Platinum van – look at a Fiat Ducato.

Simon: Fantastic. We’ll put links to that in the show notes. Matthew, thank you for being our guest today and I look forward to seeing what the response will be to these latest results.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ninaday/  

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/safe-loading-where-do-fleet-operators-get-it-wrong/

Driving for Better Business Resource Library

Driving a van: weight limits and loading https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?res=Driving+a+van%3A+weight+limits+and+loading&id=9896

Load security: good practice https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?res=Load+securing%3A+good+practice&id=9896

Load security: roles and responsibilities https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?res=Load+securing%3A+roles+and+responsibilities&id=9896

Load securing: vehicle operator guidance https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?res=Load+securing%3A+vehicle+operator+guidance&id=9896

Load security: consequences of poor load security https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?res=Load+security%3A+consequences+of+poor+load+security&id=9896

Load security: how DVSA enforces the rules https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?res=Load+security%3A+how+DVSA+enforces+the+rules&id=9896

Ratchet straps: What you need to know https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?res=Ratchet+straps%3A+What+you+need+to+know&id=9896

Securing loads on flatbed vehicles https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?res=Securing+loads+on+flatbed+vehicles&id=9896

HSE Website https://www.hse.gov.uk/

HSE Driving and Riding Safely for Work guidance https://www.hse.gov.uk/roadsafety/

Van Driver Toolkit

Safe Loading https://vandrivertoolkit.co.uk/

Loading: Know Your Limits https://vandrivertoolkit.co.uk/

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk – a podcast for those who manage drivers

and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.

Welcome to the first podcast of 2022. The Driving for Better Business Campaign is focussing on loading issues this month, so we asked Nina Day from the HSE to join us for this episode. Nina has worked for the HSE for 21 years, she’s a chartered mechanical engineer and a dangerous goods safety advisor specialising in road and workplace transport.

(transition)

Simon: Hi Nina – welcome to the podcast.

Nina: Thanks for inviting me – it’s great to be here.

Simon: Now, Nina, I know that safe loading is right at the top of HSE’s list when it comes to work related road safety. At DfBB we focus on commercial vehicles and HGVs tend to be heavily regulated but vans less so. What regulations apply to each vehicle category in respect of load safety?

Nina: Well, the regulations are the same regardless of the size of the vehicle, so it doesn’t matter if it’s an HGV or a passenger car – it’s the same legislation. We have section 48 of the road traffic act, regulation 100 of the constructions use regulations and they both say the load has to be secured to prevent someone being injured. There’s also the workplace safety aspect. If you’re an employer or you’re a self-employed person whose work covers other people which covers a lot of people in transport, then you have legal responsibilities under the safe and healthy at work act and legislation to protect anyone who works for you, and also anyone who could be at risk because of your work, so that’s wide ranging. These are 2 separate areas of law, but they do overlap. The responsibilities overlap quite a lot and it’s the same regardless of the size of vehicle.

Simon: So, what are the common problems that you see where fleet operators get this wrong and you see unsafe loads? When the regulations are ignored, what do you see on the roads?

Nina: The fundamental problem where an incident has happened – usually a fatality or a serious injury – it’s a lack of risk assessment or the risk assessment is so inadequate it may as well not have existed. That’s something I’ve seen in the vast majority in load shift incidents I’ve worked on in the last 15 years. There are a lot of misconceptions on risk assessments – but it doesn’t have to be bureaucratic and time consuming. It’s just thinking through what you do, what could go wrong and what how to stop someone getting hurt if it does go wrong. HSE provides a lot of free guidance on our website. If you haven’t thought things through, the chances of everything else being right are actually quite low. All the other issues we see follow on from not having the risk assessment right. It’s also a legal requirement so if you’re an employer or self-employed, you do need to have a risk assessment.

The other issues I see a lot are people using the wrong load securing for the load they are carrying. Load securing equipment that is damaged or old and worn and not fit for purpose, or not using enough load securing. There’s no specific method – it’s up to you depending on the load you are carrying and the vehicles you are using. Whatever you do you must secure the entire weight forward and half the weight to the sides and rear. That is a minimum and if you secure to that level the load should stay where it is in an emergency stop, if you have to swerve to avoid a child, anything like that – the load should stay where it is.

A big issue at the moment is open vehicles, whether that smaller drop side type up to big tippers because people don’t appreciate that loads can move upwards and when that happens loads can be thrown off the vehicle.

About 5 years ago a lady was killed when a piece of work equipment that weighted about 60kg bounced out the transit pickup and struck her as she and her husband were walking on the pavement. That item should have been secured and it wasn’t. It bounced up so high it cleared the height of the sides and came of the vehicle.

Only last year a man was killed when a chunk of stone that only weighed 8kg bounced of the vehicle and came thorough his car windscreen,. He was driving with his wife and grandchildren and killed instantly. No one sets out to kill anyone like that. I think one of the most difficult things I’ve ever read over the last 15 years in looking at load shift incidents was in a statement from a driver who had been involved in an incident and he started off by saying ‘I never set out to kill anyone’. But if you’re operating an open vehicle you need to make sure that load is properly sheeted, properly tied down, properly covered, big items tied down so they can’t bounce out. Don’t assume that the sides by themselves will stop the load from coming out.

Now, I think the last point I want to make is that when you’re loading a vehicle you’ve got to make sure it’s not overloaded. Its very easy to do with vans and smaller vehicles. Just be aware of what your vehicle is rated for and what you can put in it. When I’m out with the police and the DVSA I see a lot of overloaded vehicles. If you overload the vehicle if you don’t distribute the load evenly across the load bed that will affect the handling of the vehicle. It might increase the braking distances or make it more likely to roll over so it’s really important to think about how you load it and make sure you’re not overloading it.

Simon: Brilliant, so to dig in a little bit deeper into a couple of those points. We were talking about items in an open back LCV or a tipper truck that can jump out. You could go over a pothole or a speed bump, or anything – I’ve seen that happen as well. One of the things we’ve quite often seen come out of compliance checks, trucks where all the big stuff is secured properly, so plainly they know what they are doing, but then they throw a few last minute items in the back, a bucket of bolts, a generator, a shovel. They know what they’re doing but they just haven’t done it with the last bits. One of the worst things we saw were a couple of power saws with uncovered blades which could do some serious damage if they jumped out. Is that something you see? That they know what they’re doing but they just get it wrong at the last minute and throw a few bits in – it’s that attention to detail that everything is secured?

Nina: Absolutely. I think there is an assumption that if something is very small it might not move and if it does come off, what’s the danger? The reality is it doesn’t have to be a big item. If it’s flying off at 50 mph it could very easily kill a pedestrian or a cyclist, or go through a windscreen and kill a driver. It doesn’t matter how big the item is. I see it all the time. The larger items are secured really well. I see this with plant equipment on low loaders, The plant equipment is secured fantastically but any unused chains or straps are just left on the load bed and there’s nothing then to stop it coming of the side and going into oncoming traffic and I actually helped a police force investigate a fatality where that happened. A chain slipped off the side and went into oncoming traffic and killed a driver. So whatever it is, even if it’s a really small light item you need to make sure that it can’t come off. If you have lots of small items, the easiest way to secure them – put them in a box or covered container and strap that down That’s the easy way to do it – or just sheet the whole load bed and then nothing bounces out.

Simon: Because if you think that even a small item once it has momentum can do some serious damage can’t it. The other thing we were talking about was weight distribution on the bed of the truck or LCV and making sure it’s all strapped down properly but what happens if you’ve got drivers who are doing multiple drops, so you could start the day with a load where the centre of gravity is evenly spread across the axles but then as they make drops you could end up with the centre of gravity moving over one axle or it becomes too high and theres; a risk of overturning. Do you see that?

Nina: On many occasions – I think very often drivers can be frustrated about that because they know it’s a issue. What I would say is that multi drops are generally not unplanned. The company knows it is happening and this really comes back to the risk assessment. At that stage  if you’re a company delivering to lots of different sites, part of your risk assessment should be how are we ging to make sure the vehicle is safe once bits of the load comes off. That might mean talking to the delivery site and making arrangements for it to be rearranged for the driver. I think it can be quite frustrating for drivers and I’ve spoke to a lot of drivers at road side checks who bring up this point. It’s left to them to negotiate with the site to get their vehicle reloaded an sometimes that’s refused. Sites say if we reload you we are taking responsibility. It’s not from a legal perspective, particularly accurate, but it’s quite a pervasive issue I think. It’s very difficult because then you’ve got a dangerous vehicle going out on to the public highway. It is a company responsibility when you load a vehicle doing multi drops -you need to think about how it’s going to stay safe once parts of the load are coming off.

Simon: Let’s look at responsibility a little more then. Typically, if someone is driving a vehicle that’s falling foul of some road traffic act regulation – overloaded, shed load, even poor driving or vehicle maintenance, your typical expectation is that the driver would carry the can for that but when we are talking about risk assessing a load., how much involvement does a driver have there? I’ve heard stories where the driver has no awareness, he gets in the cab and is told to do the drops. Where does responsibility lie for ensuring safe load – presumably across a number of people?

Nina: Shared responsibility. Everybody in the transport chain – driver, transport operator, whoever put it on the vehicle – the consigner. From an HSE perspective we would consider  the consigner to be the primary duty holder but everybody  has some responsibility which is not the same as culpability.

While the driver may have some responsibility for the vehicle when its on the road, the driver is not necessarily culpable for the way its been loaded, the way the load has been tied down or not. There can be really good reasons for keeping drivers away from loading. If it’s a big busy site, you don’t want drivers run over by vehicles or forklift trucks. One of the risk assessments may be to keep the driver safe in a lorry park or in a safe waiting area and that’s fine, not a problem, but if that’s the route the site is going down then they should be able to give the driver some assurance that the vehicle or trailer has been loaded properly and the load has been secured so the driver is confident he is going out with a safe load

In terms of enforcement, I think historically there was a temptation that it would all land on the driver and particularly at the roadside. That’s not necessarily fair. The way that enforcement works now, it’s very much if the driver is not felt to be culpable, the driver has not had the opportunity to make the load safe, or involved in loading, they will not get a fixed penalty ticket or points on their licence. The vehicle may be prohibited from onward travel until its made safe but it will not come personally to the driver, and it’s the same with an incident. In the 15 years I’ve been looking at load shift incidents I can think of one where the driver alone was culpable. One incident in 15 years out of a few hundred so generally speaking when you have a load shift incident the culpability is actually somewhere else in the transport chain and that’s what we would look at as part of the investigation

Simon: So that would be the point that you or one of your colleagues from HSE would go and start an investigation as to whether the other people in the business have done the risk assessment, and whether correct procedures are in place to ensure safe loading and all of that kind of stuff?

Nina: There are different ways this can work. If something happens on the road, the police have primacy for that. They can ask for help or they may do the investigation alone. They will also look at other parties in the transport chain as that shared responsibility is in the road traffic act. It is in section 48 – it says the driver and anyone who causes or permits a vehicle to be on the road are responsible for its safety so that’s already in law for the police to look at that shared responsibility. Certainly, we do work with the police very closely on load security incidents. We can do a joint investigation, or we can support their investigation and that does work quite well.

Simon: There was an incident earlier in May 2021, there was a video going round that had been released of a gentleman and his wife driving out to lunch in his Tesla and as he approached a right hand bend a truck came round the other way – a flat bed truck with a load of concrete blocks on it – the driver of the truck took the corner too fast and the concrete was not secured and it slid onto the top of the Tesla, and it was only the safety structure that saved the driver and his wife because it pretty much trashed the rest of the car. I think you saw the clip at the time – that’s an example of how loads can shift if they are not fitted on properly. I don’t know whether anyone was found culpable for that?

Nina: I know the video and I think it surprised people – when loads move they do tend to move very suddenly. It can be quite difficult to imagine a heavy load of steel or concrete that had to be craned on or fork lifted on ever coming off. When you are standing next to a parked lorry looking at a load like that you wouldn’t think it would move so quickly and suddenly. It does happen and I’ve seen it many times. I think these incidents often go under the radar and people are not aware of the scale of it These days more more and more people have dash cams so we are seeing more footage of this kind of incident, but I think seeing the reality of it does raise awareness that these things do happen. The potential consequences are horrendous.

Simon: It really was quite staggering to watch – we’ve got a link to the clip on our website so we’ll put a link in the show notes if anyone hasn’t seen it – so they can see what a scary experience that was.

Coming back to the one of the things you said earlier, about common problems relating to overloading. I’ve seen some quite comical pictures almost of vehicles that are so obviously overloaded, no one who saw that vehicle could be in any doubt that it was overloaded, but I guess they are the exception, but you do see a lot of vehicles where they are overloaded to a lesser extent, and it’s maybe not obvious, but they are significantly overloaded as a safety issue because its harming the handling and braking characteristics of the vehicle.

What sort of good practice should businesses be looking at to ensure they are not overloaded? Is it just a matter of training?

Nina: One of the key things is to be really sure of what your vehicle is rated for – I know that sounds silly but it does come up a lot at road side checks. I don’t see as much overloading with the heavy goods vehicles. We tend to see it with the vans and the smaller pick up types of vehicles and sometimes people don’t know what the vehicle is rated for or they have misunderstood what it’s rated for. I was out once with the police and a 3.5 tonne body was brought in. The driver got out and said ‘its fine, its fine – its rated for 3.5 tonnes and I’ve only got 3 tonnes in the back…’- there’s nothing malicious there, not deliberately trying to evade the law it’s just a misunderstanding of what the rating actually means. That would be my key point. Be aware of what your vehicle is actually rated for – it’s not always obvious so just check what that’s rated for under UK regulations. Check with the manufacturer if you need to. Look at what you’re actually putting into it. I think with the van, most people would probably do this. You’ve got a van, you’ve got a cubic space. The temptation is to get the most in there you possibly can. So just be aware of what’s actually going in there and that weight as it’s very easy to go over – to overload it – and the fines for overloading can add up quite quickly.

Simon: I know one of the conversations I’ve had a number of times relating to multi drop couriers and home delivery services is that with everybody working from home and not going out socialising typically people are ordering a lot more alcohol for instance – wine and beers – and so a lot of the couriers are finding that they are delivering that to homes where it would have previously been less heavy cardboard boxes, it’s now a lot of liquid which is far heavier than they are used to for a given sized box. We’ve heard stories where there’s lots of overloaded vans, I’ve got that much space I can fill the space but they’re finding what’s going in is a lot heavier than a couple of years ago

Nina: This comes back again to the idea that it’s not just on the driver here. If you’re a business that is sending out goods for delivery to home addresses, and they’re heavier loads you might need to revisit your systems, your risk assessment actually – do we have to change things. That’s the key thing with risk assessments – it’s not something you do once and never look at it again, it’s a constant process because things do change. As we’ve seen with the pandemic people are working at home, ordering more things online. Things are changing and businesses need to change to make sure they are not straying into territory that’s putting people at risk.

Simon: You mentioned the guy that put 3 tonnes into the back of a 3.5-ton lorry – it’s such a safety critical error as it makes such an impact as to how the vehicle will handle. One of the things I’ve become aware of is in the vehicle recovery market where companies are recovering vehicles because people are not paying loans etc and recovering them on the back of a 3.5 tonne LCV rather than a larger vehicle. The payload on one of those is probably around a tonne if that so there’s very few cars – a very tiny super mini – you could put on the back of a 3.5 tonne flatbed, yet you hear stories of larger vehicles so that could easily be overweight. What’s the impact of someone doing that and what would be the likely consequences in terms of an investigation afterwards?

Nina: if an incident did happen and it happened because of the way the vehicle was loaded, if it happens on the road the police take the lead in investigating that and they may involve HSE or a local authority to look at the management system side. If it happens in the workplace then either we or a local authority would investigate. In any incident relating to load, the general approach would be to look at every party in the transport chain – who has done what, have people thought about what they’re doing, just to go back to what I said about risk assessment. Often people think there’s a lot of paperwork and it’s very much a box ticking exercise. You don’t need to – you need a common-sense system in your business to manage safety and that’s what we’re looking for. So the best case scenario in an incident is that you are able to produce evidence of your system. Unfortunately, the incidents I’ve been involved in, that very often hasn’t happened. It’s come out afterwards that there really is no system. There’s been a great reliance n the drivers making the best of things and doing the best they can. Drivers often make a reasonable job of it, and they keep things running but it doesn’t mean the system is fundamentally safe and that’s what we look for.

Simon: When you talk about the transport chain does that include sub-contractors? What if there’s an incident with a vehicle and the vehicle operator / owner have fallen foul of some of these things we’ve been talking about – but that transport movement was commissioned by a client and the client hasn’t checked to see whether the sub-contractor has got policies and procedures and knowledge to do it – does the client have any culpability?

Nina: It’s fair to say no 2 incidents are the same – it depends on who is felt to be in control of the transport operations and I’m sorry I can’t give you a nice black and white answer, but it is individual to the incident and the actual transport arrangements. It may be that you have a company who are the controller mind if you like and who are directing how things are done, but are not directly involved in the transport and that’s something that would come out in the investigation, because there is a duty under health and safety law to cooperate and communicate with other companies you are working with –

Simon: So they would have a responsibility to be involved and ensure any sub-contractors knew how to do this properly and ensure they use competent people?

Nina: Indeed – don’t just assume what was okay 10 years ago is still okay now – times change, technology changes. It may be there is a better way of doing things. I know since I started 15years, equipment, new trailers have come onto the market. It’s worth looking round and getting advice and seeing if there’s a better way of doing things.

Simon: What sort of resources are available to employers and fleet operators and their staff so they understand their responsibilities for risk assessments and safe loading?

Nina: I mentioned the HSE website earlier – we have risk assessment and workplace transport and load security resources on looking after visiting drivers, this is all free to access. You can also ask us a question directly. I know sometimes people are nervous because they think they are going to end up on a list for inspection – that’s not true at all. You can use the form on the website or ring us up. We will answer your question and you won’t end up on a list for inspection just because you’ve asked a question.

You can get guidance on load security from DVSA, from the gov uk site, there is all the DFT guidance, safety of loads on vehicles – those are both free to access and download. You can also get some really good advice from National Highways particularly for the smaller pick up type bodies –  they have a really good leaflet on how to load safely. But it’s also worth getting in touch with industry associations – if you’re a member they will very often have their own resources. If you’re in a union, speak to the union. I will say for drivers if you have a concern about the way things are being done – if you’re in a union speak to the union rep. if you’re not you can come to HSE directly and raise concerns with us. If there’s something you think is dangerous and putting you or other people at risk, we do look at those concerns and we do act on them

Simon: Nina that’s fantastic – we will put links to all those resources in the show notes so if you want to download any of those we have sign posts on the DFBB website to help you download and access those resources

It’s been a a fascinating discussion, thanks so much for coming on the podcast Nina.

Nina: It’s been a pleasure thank-you

I’m joined today by fatigue expert Dr Paul Jackson of Fresh Air Training

Paul is a Chartered Psychologist specialising in human performance and has assisted safety-critical organisations to implement fatigue risk management systems for over 20 years in a career that has also included positions as

• Research Manager at the Department for Transport responsible for looking at impairment resulting from fatigue, drugs and alcohol
• Visiting Lecturer in driver fatigue at Cranfield University
• Head of Impairment Research at TRL

Paul was an expert witness in last year’s landmark legal case, in which the Office of Rail and Road successfully prosecuted an employer for health and safety breaches, as a result of two of its employees being killed in a road traffic collision where fatigue was identified as the primary cause.

This successful criminal prosecution demonstrated that having policies and procedures on fatigue management is not enough.

In this podcast, Paul and I discuss:

• The events leading up to the crash,
• What the company did wrong and why it was prosecuted,
• The key lessons for employers to take away from this case,
• And where to start when looking at fatigue management.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/driver-fatigue-not-just-a-tick-box/

Useful links

Driving for Better Business Article on the case.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/articles/company-found-guilty-after-driver-fatigue-death/

Driving for Better Business ‘fitness to drive’ resources

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?section=325&category=Fitness%20to%20Drive

ORR press release on guilty verdict

https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/contractor-renown-consultants-ltd-guilty-after-two-died

ORR press release on sentencing

https://www.orr.gov.uk/search-news/contractor-renown-consultants-fined-ps450k

Transcript

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk - a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles, and want to reduce road risk in their organisation. I’m joined today by fatigue expert Dr Paul Jackson, of Fresh Air Training. Paul is a chartered psychologist, specialising in human performance, and has assisted safety critical organisations to implement fatigue risk management systems for over 20 years in a career that has also included positions as Research Manager at the Department for Transport, where he was responsible for looking at impairment resulting from fatigue, drugs and alcohol; Visiting Lecturer in driver fatigue at Cranfield University; and as Head of Impairment Research at TRL. Paul was an expert witness in last year’s landmark legal case, in which the Office of Rail and Road successfully prosecuted an employer for health and safety breaches, as a result of two of its employees being killed in a road traffic collision where fatigue was identified as the primary cause. The successful criminal prosecution demonstrated that having policies and procedures on fatigue management is not enough. In this podcast, Paul and I discuss the events leading up to the crash; what the company did wrong and why it was prosecuted; the key lessons for employers to take away from this case; and where to start when looking at fatigue management.

(transition)

Simon: Hi Paul - welcome to the podcast. Paul: Good afternoon.

Simon: We’re going to talk today about a double fatality due to driver fatigue that ultimately lead to the successful prosecution of the company that employed the two who died. Now, Zac Payne was a trainee welder who was just 20 years old. He worked for a company called Renown Consultants, and was driving a company van at the time of the crash. He had his 48 year old colleague, Michael Morris, sat next to him in the front of the van. Now, Paul, you were involved in that case as an expert witness. The outcome should have significant implications for employers. I was wondering if perhaps you could start by just giving us an outline of the events that led up to this particular crash.

Paul: Sure. So, the events that led to the renowned prosecution occurred on the night of the 18-19 June, back in 2013. In the early hours of Wednesday 19 June, the two welders you mentioned, Zac Payne and Michael Morris, were killed when their van - the van they were travelling in - crashed into an articulated lorry, which had been parked in a lay-by on the A1. They had been on their way back to Doncaster, after a night shift in Stevenage, in Hertfordshire. The previous day, the day before the incident - so that’s Tuesday 18 June - Zac Payne had driven another Renown crew up to a place to Alnmouth in Northumberland. He’d left Doncaster, where the depot was, at 4:15 in the morning, and that crew arrived at around 7:30 in the morning, and waited for the job to start. But for various reasons, that job was cancelled, and so Zac Payne then drove the crew back to Doncaster, arriving at around 3 in the afternoon. In the meantime, an urgent job had come in which required two more welders for a job near Stevenage - a place called Langley Junction. And that job was going to happen on the 18-19 June - so that Tuesday night/Wednesday morning.

The company, Renown, allocated Michael Morris as the senior welder. And the only person they could find as the assistant was Zac Payne. So, they were allocated to do the job, and they set off for Langley Junction at around 7:15 in the evening. Mr Morris was driving, and they arrived at Langley Junction at around 9:45 in the evening. They had to wait to take possession of the railway, and that happened from around 11:15. They completed their tasks, and then set off on their journey home, just after 3:30 in the morning. And this time it was Zac Payne who was driving. At around 5:30 in the morning, the van had been travelling north on the A1, and straight off the carriageway to its near side, and into a lay-by where the articulated lorry was parked. Their van hit the articulated lorry and unfortunately, tragically, both Michael Morris and Zac Payne were killed. At the time of that collision, Zac Payne - the driver - had been up for around 26 hours.

Simon: So, in this case, the prosecution was brought by the Office of Rail and Road, rather than the Health and Safety Executive. but Renown were still prosecuted under the Health and Safety at Work Act. So, could you just explain what it was they were actually prosecuted for please?

Paul: They were prosecuted on three breaches of health and safety regulations; the 1974 Health and Safety at Work Act, and the 1992 Managing the Safety of the Workforce Act. So, the first breach was failure to manage the fatigue of their workforce. Secondly, for exposing employees and non-employees to the risk of injury arising out of fatigue. And thirdly, for failing to make a suitable and sufficient risk assessment before these two particular employees were sent out on that night shift.

Simon: So, fatigue was clearly identified in this case as the primary cause of these Fatalities, but, in the rail industry, fatigue is well known as a risk because they’ve got a large workforce that are often operating at night because that’s when the tracks are free for maintenance or they’re doing shift work. So what went wrong in this case on the management side? Did they have a system for managing fatigue?

Paul: They had procedures. They had, I suppose, the rudimentary elements of a fatigue management system. Certainly they were not without procedures. The procedures they had included a policy - a fatigue management policy, procedures for assessing the risks associated with fatigue, and particularly the procedure to authorise excess hours; so where somebody was being requested to work longer hours than normal, they had an authorisation form that was meant to be completed as a result of the risk assessment. What went wrong was that the company didn’t follow its own fatigue management procedures. In addition to that, they didn’t comply with the working time limits for safety critical work - such as welding - which require that there should be a minimum rest period of 12 hours between booking off from a turn of duty to booking on for the next duty. In addition to that, they didn’t conduct a sufficient and suitable risk assessment - particularly of the fatigue of Zac Payne, who as I mentioned had been awake for a considerable length of time even before starting this job.

Simon: You see a broad spread of attitudes, shall we say, among companies towards risk. Where, at one end you have a total disregard – don’t care, not interested in managing risk, just doesn’t register and all they care about is running the business, up to the other end, where managing risk is central to the business, and nothing happens unless it’s done the correct way. In the middle, you often have people who maybe want to do the right thing but maybe haven’t got the time or are under pressure, or they don’t have the experience to do it properly. Are you able to say where Renown’s management fitted on that scale?

Paul: Yes, and I think perhaps it’s better for me to refer to the sentencing remarks of the judge in this particular case - His Honour Judge Godsmark. In his sentencing remarks he said that he was satisfied that if Renown had followed their fatigue management procedures - if they’d implemented them - that would have amounted to all that was reasonably practicable to negate the risk of injury through fatigue – but it was in the implementation of those procedures that Renown failed their employees. He went on to say that the operations managers at Doncaster knew what they were supposed to do in managing the safety of their employees - particularly in relation to fatigue - but, only lip service was paid to these systems.

He concluded that there was a wilful blindness of operations managers when it came to considerations of fatigue - particularly in relation to driving times and the distances to and from jobs. He also said that evidence from the employees - other Renown employees - suggested that safety briefings could be perfunctory, and concentrated on getting ticks in boxes. I think one of the other damning elements of the case was that although Renown was subject to annual audits from an independent third party, those audits didn’t shine a light on the way in which those procedures - those stated procedures - were actually being applied, or not applied. And as a consequence, Renown failed to prove that they were doing all that was reasonably practicable to implement those written fatigue procedures. So, you have a weight of evidence there which suggests that this is a box ticking exercise. The management didn’t really take fatigue seriously. And it probably suggests issues with the culture of the organisation. I think this is not confined to Renown, who weren’t a bad company and are still operating today, so clearly are doing a lot right, but I think many organisations fail on this level whereby they may well have procedures written, on a whole range of safety issues, but they need to be collecting the data, documenting their actions, so that they can demonstrate to the regulator that they are following those procedures.

Simon: That attitude that you said was prevalent among the operations managers - I’m assuming that was just below board level - was that attitude reflected with the senior management of the business?

Paul: Very much so. The operations management were specifically referred to by the judge, and it’s clear that that same attitude even persisted during the trial. I think one of the comments that the judge made was that, despite this incident having occurred in 2013 and changes having been made subsequently to procedures and particularly to Renown’s policy on driver fatigue, that wasn’t the change that was needed. The paperwork was adequate, he said; it was the implementation that needed to be looked at. Essentially, what was needed was a change in the culture of the senior management team.

Simon: I think you referred to it as a ‘tick box culture’ before, and that kind of thing is not just restricted to driver fatigue, is it? We see that for many companies, for many different elements of risk management as well. There was one thing that struck me when you were outlining the events running up to the incident - while Zac Payne was driving at the time of the crash, you said Michael Morris - his colleague - was driving to that second job that Zac was on. So was that Michael Morris’ first shift, or had he also been at work for as long as Zac?

Paul: No, he’d rested that day. He hadn’t worked in the same way that Zac had. He had already been scheduled to work that night shift so he was probably better prepared, or had the opportunity to be better prepared. I think one of the big problems with Zac Payne’s situation was he was given very little notice of this night duty - and clearly not enough time to prepare adequately to be sufficiently rested before undertaking that night duty.

Simon: And clearly he would have been potentially at risk carrying out the work because he was fatigued - but I was intrigued because Michael Morris was plainly insured on the van if he drove to the job, so I was wondering why Michael Morris didn’t drive on the way home, as Zac must have been clearly overtired.

Paul: Yes. I think there was an informal arrangement where one drove on the way, and one drove on the way back. That seemed to have been fairly standard practice within the organisation at the time.

Simon: One of the reasons Zac took on this extra shift, I believe, is that Renown was also found guilty of creating a staff payment structure that encouraged its employees to take on extra shifts - so he took on that extra shift because he would have been allowed to earn extra money. I think you mentioned that they had a policy around the authorisation of excess hours, so presumably, one of the management processes should have prevented him saying yes to that shift, or more to the point should have prevented him being asked in the first place.

Paul: Well I think the policy you’re alluding to really is their zero hours contract. So, there was an incentive to work fatigued, because of course when they weren’t working they weren’t getting paid. Obviously that creates an incentive to take any shifts that are given to you - particularly for a young man like Zac who was keen to keep in with his employers. He was keen to get his welding qualification. He’d been given indication that he would be put on the next welder’s course if he did as he was asked, so he was very keen to, A, take on extra duties; and B, to do everything he could to keep his management happy. Unfortunately the side effect of that is there’s an incentive to hide fatigue and to continue working even when fatigue might be an issue.

Simon: The management failures weren’t just around fatigue - there were also problems around the driver checks I think, weren’t there? Because Zac wasn’t really insured to be driving the van in the first place I don’t think.

Paul: Yes, their insurance policy required drivers to be over 25 to be covered by the insurance. Zac was only 20. Clearly he was not insured, or covered by the insurance. But that seemed to be quite endemic within the organisation - to the extent that on the previous duty, the early duty, where Zac drove up to Northumberland, none of the crew in that vehicle were over 25 and qualified to drive. So clearly there was no possibility that they could follow their procedures, or their insurance policy procedures, for that particularly duty, so it was definitely a frequent occurrence, even though at the trial I think the management maintained that they were unaware of that. I think the general view of the court was that that was probably not the case.

Simon: I’m sure I read as well that the investigating authorities had interviewed a number of other staff within the business that backed up that that was a regular occurrence.

Paul: Yes, absolutely.

Simon: Because that’s something I’ve brought up many times when I’ve been discussing the possibility of a prosecution. One of the things that employers need to be aware of is that the investigating authorities aren’t just investigating your policies and procedures, and what you did; they will go and interview other people in the company, and they’ll typically find some of the most disaffected employees who will tell it like it is. So there’s very little opportunity for you to try and cover up something that actually is widespread practice within the business.

Paul: And I think that’s very much the case with this particular investigation. As I said, this investigation lasted 7 years. During that time, the ORR interviewed I think about 70 or 80 different witnesses. The witness bundle runs to nearly 2000 pages. It was clearly a very in depth investigation. It didn’t just stop with witnesses from within the organisation, but also witnesses from other organisations, people who had been on site at the time. There were also things like phone records, hotel records to see whether any employees were being given hotels after night duties - which was, again, one of their written mitigations for managing fatigue. A whole range of data was collected and analysed, so yes, a very, very thorough investigation.

Simon: There was one bit about this case that particularly staggered me, and you mentioned in your introduction at the start that the original crash happened in June 2013. So the fact that the length of time for the investigation and prosecution was a full 7 years for that to be concluded because, I think, the verdict was announced in March 2020, and then the sentencing was in June. So, a full 7 years under the stress of that investigation and prosecution. Did you see what kind of effect that had on those who were involved in the incident?

Paul: To a certain extent, yes. I mean, you can only imagine the stress, the anxiety, the impact on every aspect of your psychology, if you like, that having a case like that hanging over your head for that length of time must have had on those individuals. I think it was evident at the trial - this was clearly something that had been going on for so long the impact was inevitably going to be quite profound, in terms of its impact on their stress levels, if nothing else.

But of course, all of that pails in significance by comparison with the impact on the families of those individuals who were killed tragically. But yes, it’s clear that the prosecution and the consequences of prosecution aren’t limited to the fines that were imposed upon the company. I think the longer term impact on the management of that company would be equally damaging I suppose - it would be difficult to cope with.

Simon: Yes, absolutely. And without trying to minimise the stress and trauma that the families went through - as a business owners it’s got to be an incentive to do this properly; to manage it properly. Now I’m sure we’ve got many employers listening to the podcast now who know that fatigue is an issue in their business - and maybe we’ve got some where it isn’t recognised perhaps to the level it should be. What do you think are the main takeaways for employers from this particular incident?

Paul: There are a few. I think maybe the first starting point is, as you said, employers who recognise that fatigue is affecting their business - can you articulate that? What is it that you do that might be contributing to fatigue? What are the fatigue related hazards to the safety of your employees? That’s the starting point. Is it because you’re operating at night, like this company were? You do long hours? Whatever it might be, identifying the contributors to fatigue is the starting point for me. Secondly, thinking about what are the worst case scenarios - what could go wrong if an employee was exposed to fatigue? And then once you’ve identified those beginning and end points, if you like, the next step is to be able to understand and identify what controls you have in place to prevent that contributor to fatigue resulting in an employee experiencing fatigue. So do you have sufficient controls in place for each potential contributor? How robust are those controls? How likely are they to be subject to degradation over time? Then, in the worst case scenario where an individual does experience fatigue, where your controls have failed, what mitigations do you have in place to prevent that fatigue resulting in the worst case scenario - for example a traffic accident. I think only when you can answer those questions adequately - as an employer, as the accountable manager of an organisation – it’s only then you can sleep safely and recognise that you’re doing everything you can that is reasonably practicable to manage and negate the risk of injury through fatigue. But the starting point for all of that is getting the culture right within the organisation. I think one of the main failings of the Renown business at the time of this incident was that lack of safety culture around fatigue. It wasn’t recognised in the way it should be, and, as the judge said, paying lip service to the systems they had written. That’s where the main failings are, and that’s where I think an organisation really needs to start it’s more effective management of fatigue.

Simon: The fact that they had the policies shows that obviously they were clearly aware fatigue was an issue that needed to be managed, and that they didn’t follow those policies, led to the accident. Obviously, if you weren’t aware fatigue was a problem, you could have still had a similar accident. The fact that they demonstrated they knew that it was an issue by creating the policies – that’s almost worse isn’t it? Because it makes the failure a wilful failure.

Paul: Yes I can see where you’re going with that. Very much so. As that judge referred to - a wilful blindness of the operations managers when it came to considerations of fatigue. So they recognised that what they were doing was likely to cause, or contribute to, fatigue, but, other matters got in the way of the effective management of that issue. I think, even though they had procedures in place, it was clear that the operations staff, at the Doncaster depot at least, didn’t really understand how to use those procedures - which all contributed to that idea that this was just ticking a box to say ‘yes, we’ve got procedures in place, they’re compliant with the regulations’ But of course, as you say, the fact that they recognised fatigue as an issue, and had stated how they managed it, and then failed to do so, was doubly damning I suppose is one way of looking at it.

Simon: You mentioned when we were talking about the staff contract structure, and the incentivisation of working extra hours, that they were on zero hours contracts. Is that a common thing in other sectors, for instance, where it could cause driver fatigue to be an issue?

Paul: I think in the last few years there’s been increased recognition of the prevalence of what they call the gig economy which essentially is founded on multiple zero hours contracts. Having several different jobs with different employers - but each of those being a zero hours contract. I think yes it is more prevalent than it used to be. Whether it’s more prevalent in certain industries than others... probably in the road transport sector - certainly delivery drivers, for example. I know there have been cases where organisations have been challenged on the nature of their contracts with their employees - partly on the basis that it’s not an effective management of the health and safety of those individuals who, for all intents and purposes, are under the control of that employers - so, yes, I think it’s certainly increased in prevalence in recent times. And I don’t think it’s a healthy situation as this case really demonstrates, tragically.

Simon: Yes. I wanted to ask you a final question just about fatigue more broadly, I Guess, and that’s how conscious do employers need to be around staff personal Situations - where, it might not be obvious that the job itself is causing fatigue, but if the job involves driving, and circumstances in the employee’s personal life might cause fatigue in another way. They might have sleep apnoea, they might have young children that keep them awake at night, they might have other anxieties or worries that cause them mental strain in other ways and prevent them sleeping properly. How much do employers need to take account of those kinds of issues?

Paul: Tricky isn’t it. I think there’s only so much that an organisation can do, in terms of managing fatigue within the business, and there is always going to be a requirement for the individual to take some responsibility for their personal fitness for duty. It’s clear that fatigue doesn’t just originate from either one source or the other. Clearly there are contributors to fatigue associated with the operational practices, as was the case with this particular company. There will also be a whole range of contributors to fatigue, potentially, which originate in the personal life of the individual; their lifestyle, their health, social activities, etcetera, etcetera. The conventional approach to addressing that potential problem or weakness in the system is to ensure that the culture is right around honest and open reporting. So, we often talk in fatigue management circles about the importance of shared responsibility. The employer has a responsibility to provide time off and adequate time to enable the individuals to have obtained sufficient sleep. The equivalent responsibility for the individual is to use that time to obtain adequate sleep. Secondly, the employer has the responsibility to take seriously any reports of fatigue that are brought to their attention, and to put in place the mechanisms, if you like, or framework - be it a form, or a reporting system - which gives individuals the opportunity to come forward and hold their hands up and say ‘sorry, I’m too fatigued’ but by the same token, the individuals within the organisation - the employees - have the equivalent responsibility to do so; to hold their hands up and say ‘personal factors outside of work may be contributing to my fatigue’. That all requires, for many organisations, quite a significant change in culture. I can well believe that some of the people listening to this podcast will think ‘well that’s never going to happen in my organisation - people don’t hold their hands up and say they’re fatigued’;. If that’s the case, if you truly believe that, then you certainly need to do something to try and address that issue because that’s always going to be a barrier. If you don’t have the information, and people don’t feel comfortable to come forward with that information, then how do you know what your fatigue risk truly is?

Simon: Paul, thank you for sharing your insights and expertise with us. If anyone has any questions on fatigue management, are you happy for them to get in touch with you?

Paul: Yes, it’s been a pleasure to talk to you - and if anyone does have any questions that haven’t been addressed by this particular podcast, by all means contact me - either via my website - freshairtraining.co.uk, or by email - paul@freshairtraining.co.uk. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

Simon: Fantastic. Paul, it’s been a pleasure to have you on the show - thank you very much.

Paul: Thanks very much indeed. Cheers Simon.

Welcome to this edition of Let's Talk Fleet Risk - a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles, and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.

In this episode, Simon Turner, Campaign Manager for Driving for Better Business, is joined by Phil Hitchen, the Managing Director of Belle Vue Manchester - award-winning and quality-branded transport provider.

Phil and Simon discuss

• The importance of driver personality to good service and maintaining high standards across multiple locations
• Reducing driver stress, and recognising and rewarding good driver performance
• Why awards are so important to the business, helping to drive a culture of consistent high standards

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/driver-wellbeing-how-rewards-breed-success/

Useful Links:

Belle Vue website

https://bellevue-mcr.com/

10 Mistakes to avoid when procuring school transport

http://yellowschoolbus.co.uk/

Transcript

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk – a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles, and who want to reduce road risk in their organisation. I’m Simon Turner and I’m the campaign manager for Driving for Better Business – and my guest in this episode is Phil Hitchen, who’s the Managing Director of Belle Vue Manchester, an award winning and quality branded transport provider. In this episode, Phil and I discuss the importance of driver personality to good service and maintaining high standards across multiple locations. We talk about reducing driver stress and recognising and rewarding good driver performance. And finally, we look at why awards are so importance to the business, helping to drive a culture of consistent high standards.

(transition)

Simon: Hi Phil, and welcome to the podcast.

Phil: Morning Simon! Pleasure to be here.

Simon: Phil, most businesses only have to worry about the risks to their drivers or other road users, yet your vehicles are generally full of customers as well, which could be quite a daunting challenge. What’s your view on work-related road risk at Belle Vue?

Phil: I think from a transport point of view… if you train your people right, your drivers right, do your safety checks and health and safety announcements, and show passengers what to do in the event of an emergency… I think if that comes second nature and ingrained in the way they just reel it off every job… I think if your maintenance team follow the operational guidelines and procedures, it just runs like clockwork and it’s no fluke that your insurance claims records stay low, your MOT pass rates stay at 100%, when it comes to vehicle inspections… the traffic commission and DVSA alike with their inspections every 6 weeks; we like to do ours every 4 weeks because we operate from an ethos of ‘a stitch in time saves nine’ and it keeps the fleet running at optimum level.

Simon: So what’s the biggest challenge you think you face in running a safe service for customers?

Phil: I think in 2019/20/21, it’s evident there’s a shortage of PCV and HGV drivers in the UK. I think we’re quite proactive on training drivers to basically meet a service charter which requires things (to be a little higher standard) than the average. We have to recruit more numbers now to get the quality of driver we want, whereas 10 years ago they’d come flooding through the doors, you’ve got a nice fleet, you pay good wages, you’re a nice company to work for an youd look after your team. Right now, after a pandemic, coach drivers have gone into other trades… there is a huge shortage.

So for me, the biggest challenge at the moment, which has gone on for about 3 or 4 years since the CPC really kicked in, where elder drivers retired and didn’t want to go through the CPC, and there’s a shortage of young drivers coming through, so I think the biggest challenge to the industry and certainly our business is getting the right calibre of drivers through the door in the first instance.

Simon: And how do you then look at ensuring they’ve got the capabilities and the right attitude? How much effort do you put into driver assessment and training to ensure that they do deliver the level of service that you expect from them all?

Phil: We probably do a lot more than your average company, and we probably do some things differently than some of the top companies in the UK. My philosophy is we recruit personalities and we teach them to drive later. So, what we do is, straight from the offer and application form, we measure people’s personalities. Once that’s done, they do a driving assessment. If they get offered the position, they then do anything that could start from a 1 day to 5 day induction training, depending on experience. About 10 years ago, I knew our business could do a lot better, and I knew our drivers could drive better. I knew that as a business, the directors and the board and the management team could perform better – so we decided to put tracking systems on all of our fleet; what that did was tell us how drivers accelerate, how they brake and how they corner. We decided to use a system called Traffilog, because I perceive that to be the market leading system – National Express favoured that. Operators who work for National Express only seem to use the basics that National Express wanted to use, whereas we used everything. We literally drove peak performance driving, and then when we’d done that and we were saving copious amounts of fuel, which was about £63,000 per annum, we decided to use this personality tool to measure people so that we could get them to respond to passengers and give better service.

Simon: So with the tracking system then, that would typically give you a lot of data on driver behaviour – how much time do you spend analysing that data and how do you use that to improve performance and improve the service?

Phil: So, any bus or coach operation has key performance indicators. The accounts department, they have certain KPIs that they look at – the bank balance, the direct costs, the sales, the overhead. They’re always looking at their dashboard of figures. In operations – in tracking our drivers let’s say – we have people in compliance, whether it’s watching CCTV or watching the tracking system, we have people watching the idling times. Basically, it’s on a scoring system, and if you visualise a scoring system from 0-200… when we first set out, we had drivers averaging between 40 and 100, so 0-20 would be really good, it’s what we call “The A Team”. 20-50 is good, and 50-100 I class as average. Over 100-150 is inefficient, and 150-200 is technically dangerous. We made it company policy to get all our drivers under 50. When we achieved that, we had 1 or 2 stragglers, lurking around 60-70. And some of these guys were experienced, we’re not talking about somebody who’s just passed the PCV licence and is a bit of a novice. Just regarding accelerating, braking, and cornering. Imagine a coach going down a main road at 30mph, about a quarter of a mile away they see the lights turn to red – an educated driver will take his foot off the accelerator, cruise down to about 20mph, they’ll see the lights change and he’ll put his foot to feather the accelerator and he’ll build that back up. And if you imagine you saw a chart where people are driving erratically, it would go up in the air and then drop down when he brakes, it would go like a zig-zag. When you get tracking education into drivers, those sharp points become smooth ridges, like a wave on the ocean. And I had drivers saying to me, “…what are you going to teach me about coach driving – I’ve been driving 20 years”, and I say – this is science, let’s just go with it. They say “…well the girl who’s monitoring it doesn’t even have a PCV licence – what’s she going to teach me?”. And then suddenly they did get all these notifications about over-accelerating, cornering incorrectly, and braking. We educated them – we’d send supervisors and operations managers out with them. And literally in a 2 month period we’d get all our team under 50. Then we got a league table; we have a bus league, a school bus league, and a coach league. And what we do is we have £300 worth of prizes, so basically the top performing driver gets £150 a month, the second and third placed drivers get £75 each. And it’s not because of the money, but it’s a bit like soldiers – you’ve got Dad’s Army, the regular army, the paratroopers, the SAS… Coach drivers are the same. They want to be in the SAS. They want to walk in their driver room knowing they’re a top performing driver. When we got the league tables going – and it wasn’t just for the money, although that did influence people – they would compete with their colleagues to get the top scores, and that’s driving with a 0 score. That means no events, no harsh braking, no over-accelerating, and those KPIs that our compliance team see, if they go above the 20 which we class as ‘The A Team’, what happens is, when people are driving efficiently, they drive safer, passengers get a comfier ride, there are less roadside RTAs, there are more vehicles on the road rather than in the garage being repaired. If you invest in that system, and you invest in the right supervisors and compliance team tracking, drivers do perform better. When they don’t, you know there’s education/training to get them where they should be. And if they haven’t got the desire to improve, you replace them.

Simon: I love the idea of the SAS of coach drivers. How have the drivers responded to that then? That seems like a fairly comprehensive driver recognition system, where you really are rewarding the right attitude and good behaviours. How did the drivers respond to that?

Phil: Well in the early days, if you look at coach driving over the 60s and the 70s, throughout the North-West of England for example, you had streets and streets of neighbours getting on a coach and going on a jolly to Blackpool for a week. Then the motor car came along, and drivers used to have this situation with the passengers, where they’d go on holiday and, while everyone’s having their dinner, they’d swap all the pyjamas of everyone on the first floor with those on the second floor, and cause chaos. Once they were out of that coach depot, they were very much a law unto themselves.

Fast forward to 2020, a driver’s now got a tracking system monitoring his every move, any operations manager’s mobile phone can see where any fleet vehicle is at any time, they can see whether the engine’s on or off, we have live CCTV on the vehicles to see what’s moving – so they’re very much controlled. When that came in, over the last 10 years, drivers were a little bit negative towards it. But once they realised that if they have an insurance claim against them that’s not their fault, it’s non-fault, we have 8 cameras all over the vehicle – 4 inside, 4 outside – those cameras support the evidence of the story of the drivers, and we have non-fault claims. At first drivers were a little bit negative, but in this day and age now we live in a transparent world, it’s just second nature to the driver, they take it on board and they quite like it really. They’ve got cameras there covering them, operations can support them if there were any hostile events on the road, which are very rare. We do live in a busy society now on the motorway, and local and regional roads – you do get unsavoury behaviour sometimes with motorists, and I think drivers feel a bit more secure now.

Simon: Yeah. It’s quite clear that you put a lot of effort into this, and I know that on the website you’ve got not only your safety policy but also your core values on safety. So what do those core values mean to you, as the managing director of that business?

Phil: What they mean to me is, if I went to a restaurant and I see a nice menu, and there’s a star with the core values about where the food is sourced from, how the chef is passionate about cooking certain ingredients in a certain way to give a certain flavour… that would really enthuse me to buy into that brand. Everybody has favourite brands – I buy clothes from Hugo Boss, or there are certain Italian restaurants that I frequent in Manchester. But when it comes to coach travel, there are people who pick up the phone once a year and want a jolly to the seaside, or to the Christmas party. There are other corporate organisations and schools and education centres that have passengers moving every day. With our core values, it’s not something we’re playing at; it’s our livelihoods, it’s something we’ve done for decades. We like people to understand our ethos on coach travel, and our ethos is every school trip should be safe – and not only that, it should be fun-packed, it should be a carefree adventure. I remember when I was about 10 years of age, I had a coach trip to Chatsworth House. I haven’t got a clue who the driver was or who the company was, I just went to a nice stately home. If somebody said to me that they went on a Belle Vue coach trip and they didn’t know the driver’s name, and they didn’t know it was our company I would be horrified, because we like our drivers to present to the passengers in a certain way. I think values are very important for any business.

Simon: You operate obviously across the country, from London right up to Scotland, and I think you operate throughout Europe as well, and you subcontract to other companies and you’ve got a really broad operation geographically – and I think you’ve grown quite rapidly too. So how do you ensure those standards are maintained across all the locations in which you operate?

Phil: If we do a deal with a customer, or we take on a new member of staff, or we subcontract to another company, we like to communicate well, and the deal has to work for both parties.

So, if we take on a new member of staff, we promise to pay every month on the 7th of the month, we promise to pay bonuses for peak performance, and there are other perks and benefits which I won’t bore you with that we promise to do. What we expect in return in that contract of employment is to be smart and well-groomed, to carry out safety checks, to act in the company’s best interests, and to be on best performance day-in, day-out. When it comes to dealing with subcontractors – so we operate from Manchester and the North-West of England, we operate all around the UK, mainly in the North-West, a little bit in London and around certain cities like Glasgow and Edinburgh, we do tours into Europe – all those tours into Europe are not from operating centres in Europe. They’re all trips that have come from the North-West of England, or in the Midlands, or occasionally down South. They’ll go all around Europe, and they are for tour operators or private hire groups, with the strategic partners we have located. So we have an array of operators, and I think about 8-10 years ago, somebody phoned me up and said “I want 5 coaches in London, I want you to do it”, and we didn’t have any fleet in London, so we started getting industry partners with our same ethos of quality, vehicle presentation, maintenance standards, we’d obtained their licences and insurance, their operational guidelines, we’d get them to sign paperwork… we’d do a cross-deal, so if they represent us in London, we represent them in Manchester, and then that happened with other cities. Occasionally – very, very occasionally – you might get a slight poor performance with one operator, and we’ll drop that operator. Normally we just marry up with drivers who want to work with our ethos, and other subcontractors who work on that. We promise to pay at the rate agreed, and have a working relationship that works, really, and is reciprocated.

Simon: I know you subcontract work out to partner companies as you said, but equally you’re effectively a subcontractor to some corporate clients. One of the things I wanted to delve a little bit deeper into was, where you’re an outsourced provider for a business, and that business effectively still has a duty of care to its staff – you might be running a minibus shuttle service for a business, or a coach trip to take business directors or clients out somewhere – so your client has a duty of care to ensure the safety of all those staff, and that the transport service is provided in accordance with the law, it’s done safely, the vehicles are all well-maintained and all of that. So how importantly do you think your clients take that, and how importantly do you take that responsibility to ensure that you can prove to that client, that business customer, that you do all of these things to such a high standard?

Phil: Well, everything we do is audited, whether it’s vehicle presentation, driver service, driver presentation, driving skills, etcetera. And they can leave comments; they can leave negative comments for improvement, they can leave praise, they can give an overall driver summary in a testimonial. So when we get those after-sales reports round the table every Friday afternoon, tens and tens of after-sales forms, sometimes hundreds – we will look at those, and we’re not looking for the 10/10 and the glowing testimonial, although that’s very good; we can use those testimonials on websites. What we’re looking for is somebody who says something like “everything was 10/10, the service was great, however the coach was 5 minutes late”. We think it’s really important to get a great start on any journey; if you’re late, if there’s a breakdown, if the customer’s frustrated… It takes hours out of that day to pull that back. And it can be pulled back, but our philosophy, just like preventive maintenance, is to look at the after-sales forms, look where we can improve the business, and it’s evolving all of the time.

Simon: I find that bit really interesting actually, because fatigue and stress and things like that are significant contributors to collisions and such like, and actually what you’re doing – you called it preventive maintenance – what you’re actually doing is removing some of that stress from the drivers, because they’re all more prepared, aren’t they? They’re in earlier, they know what to expect – it’s taken a lot of that stress away from drivers, which just makes them calmer and less likely to have an accident, doesn’t it?

Phil: Very much so. If you look at a pyramid of an organisation – your board of directors at the top, then the senior management, then the operations team, then your garage staff, and then your valeters, and then your drivers – in any normal organisation you would see the pyramid with the directors at the top and the drivers at the bottom. Really, you need to reverse that so the drivers are at the top and the directors are at the bottom. Because really, drivers are out there battling through traffic; congestion these days is far more serious than it was say 30 years ago. Drivers need every resource to be able to execute their job to a high standard. They feed things back, and I think listening to the drivers and changing things means people feel more valued. I think in terms of taking details, and being thorough on bookings, rather than the driver being a bit blind, it all makes for a calmer day. It’s all down to the planning really Simon.

Simon: Yeah. And you clearly do that well. I know you’ve got your safety policies on the website as well, you’re proud of those, and they clearly work extremely well in practice. And you’ve got a whole load of UK coach awards as a company. You’ve been awarded ‘Best Coach Company’, ‘Best Business Coach Company’, ‘Best Business’, ‘Best Customer Service’, Innovation Awards… and it’s not just the business, it’s individual staff as well – your staff have received industry recognition. Not just the drivers, you’ve got engineers, customer service staff, office staff – you’ve obviously created a really fantastic culture in the business where everybody in Belle Vue follows the values of the business – they mean as much to the individual staff as they do to you. So, has that translated into benefits for the business, in terms of higher performance, lower crashes, lower costs? What are the business benefits from operating the business as you do?

Phil: What the benefits are… we have a very, very strong people culture. Around 7 years ago we invested in 5 brand new Mercedes-Benz Turismo coaches. And Evobus – who we bought them off, the Mercedes-Benz dealership – invited us over to Turkey to watch the coaches being made. And then they invited us to Petronas Formula 1 team, and we had a tour around one of their factories. My co-director, who’s a bit of a petrolhead, saw Nico Rosberg’s Formula 1 racing car – I wasn’t particularly interested in that… But what I was interested in was the ethos of Mercedes-Benz Formula 1 team. When you see Nico Rosberg shake the champagne when he wins a race, everybody thinks he’s the man. What they don’t realise is, when he goes in the pit, there are 12 engineers there, one with an earpiece. And in that earpiece are 42 engineers back in Northampton with a computer connected to some part of that car. So the moral of the story is, it’s a team game. Coach driving is exactly the same. If we’re going to get a 10/10 performance during a coach tour or corporate trip, those mechanics have to be on board, the operators have to be on board, the accounts and compliance and HR teams… they’re all part of that. So, we really get across a great team ethos. We want people who are passionate about what they do. When we look at industry awards, we think “who are the best performing people in our business?”. We encourage our people to compete, because what we like them to do is have a taste of success. There are all sorts of awards for Unsung Heroes – someone who goes around, does a great job, and never gets any thanks or recognition, a bit like a defender or midfielder in a football team, not the guy who gets all the goals. We like to decorate our people, and once they get a taste of that, success breeds success. And when somebody sees that we’re working with the UK Coach Driver of the Year, they all want a taste of that. The only reason we do that, is that after that accolade, they have to maintain a high standard of service – customer service – on that coach. And that just brings more business in.

Simon: I was going to ask that actually – delivering to that level, and the staff culture, and the awards – that requires a lot of effort as a team to put all that together. Does that actually translate into a high level of business? Does it make a difference when you’re pitching for work?

Phil: Of course it makes a difference. If you were going to hire a coach to transfer your staff or guests or clients, and you’ve got a company who not only invest in modern vehicles but have got all these safety standards and KPIs that are quite impressive, and they’ve got a team who clearly demonstrate that the customer is number one and king, and they communicate more effectively – I don’t know any other passenger transport business in England who teaches their drivers to communicate with their passengers in that way.

Simon: I think it’s one of the biggest benefits I see, when it’s clear that a company is operating at that level it really does translate into a better impression with the potential clients, it helps retain business, it helps win new business, so I think you’ve proved that again. You’ve been running Belle Vue in its current guise now for around 25 years I think. So I’ve got a final question for you, which is what’s the most important thing you’ve learnt around managing drivers and managing vehicles in that time?

Phil: I think it’s learning to light people’s fire really. People have different passions – I mean if you want somebody to perform at a certain level you need to find their switch that turns them into someone who’s got desire. Desire to perform. The biggest thing I see across the industry, when you go to coach parks, you go to Alton Towers – you see different levels of desire of drivers. Some are there just for the sake of it; some are there just to earn a living; some drivers will do the minimum they have to do to get through the day; and others just exude customer service. So, I think it’s finding people’s desire, trying to line up their personal goals, and wants and needs for their aspirations, and lining them up with the company’s business model. And when that happens, fantastic things start to happen. We’ve won Engineer of the Year in our garage, we’ve had other people take silver and bronze, and I’m talking young people here, not people who have been experienced for decades. We’ve had Unsung Heroes in operations, we’ve had UK Coach Driver of the Year, 2 years ago. I think for me, the biggest thing I’ve learnt about the business is nothing mechanical or operational. It’s about human behaviour, and how we can get the peak performing teams.

Simon: Fantastic final pearl of wisdom, thank you Phil. Thank you so much for being on the show and sharing your insights with us, really appreciate it.

Phil: You’re very welcome Simon, I wish you all the best.

My guest in this episode is David Malone who is the Transport and Travel Advisor for The Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.

His responsibilities include setting and implementing the strategic direction for all hospital managed transport as well as all delivery transport movements to and from site.

This includes not just fleet vehicles, vans, pool cars and grey fleet but also car parking, park and ride, passenger transport services, taxis and couriers.

David also chairs two Best Practice Groups for the NHS National Performance Advisory Group - one for Transport and Logistics, and the second for car parking, sustainable transport and active travel policy.

In this podcast I’m going to be talking to David about how he manages such a wide range of transport activities including a grey fleet of almost five thousand and the challenges of driver communication with such a large workforce. We discuss the challenges around ensuring outsourced transport providers meet their legal obligations to manage road risk, and we look at how the Trust’s transport activities will need to develop in the future to meet their zero-carbon ambitions.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/nhs-hospital-managed-transport-the-challenges/

Useful Links: 

Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals declare climate emergency

https://www.newcastle-hospitals.nhs.uk/about/ambitions/climate-emergency/

DfBB resources for Grey Fleet

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?section=312&category=Grey%20Fleet

Transcript

Simon: Welcome to Let's Talk Fleet Risk - a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles, and who want to reduce road risk in their organisation. I'm Simon Turner, and I'm the campaign manager for Driving for Better Business. And my guest for this episode is David Malone, who's the transport and travel advisor for the Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. His responsibilities include setting and implementing the strategic direction for all hospital-managed transport, as well as all delivery transport movements to and from site. This includes not just fleet vehicles - vans, pool cars and grey fleet - but also car parking, park and ride, passenger transport services, taxis and couriers. David also chairs two Best Practice groups for the NHS National Performance Advisory Group; one on transport and logistics, and the second for car parking, sustainable transport and active travel policy. In this podcast, I'm going to be talking to David about how he manages such a wide range of transport activities - including a grey fleet of almost 5000 - and the challenges of communication with such a large workforce. We discuss the challenges around ensuring outsourced transport providers meet their legal obligations to manage road risk, and we look at how the Trust's transport activities will need to develop in the future to meet their zero carbon ambitions.

(transition)

Simon: Hi David. Welcome to the podcast.

David: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me on.

Simon: David - hospital trusts have a huge range of transport activities as part of their routine business operations. I was hoping you could start by just telling us a little bit more about your role - how many vehicles you're responsible for, and the different types of staff mobility and transport movements that a trust like yours needs to manage.

David: Okay, so in terms of the size of our organisation - we're one of the largest trusts in the United Kingdom, and we provide a huge range of specialties across the whole of the Northern region, and in some cases beyond. In terms of our fleet size, we don't have a huge in-house fleet. Mostly estate vehicles, catering vehicles and the like. The fleet itself is quite small - but we do run lease schemes. So we've got about 200 business cars out and about - so that's for community nursing provided across the region. But we also, as a result of that, have quite a significant amount of grey fleet - not so much to go out and visit the community but more for staff moving between the two major hospital sites we have. So in terms of fleet, we've got to be conscious of all that movement.

Then there's obviously the pressures of car parking. We've got 120,000 outpatients coming through the doors. We've got 16,000 staff. And I don't have 16,000 spaces. So we've got to try and accommodate all of those vehicles and all of those movements within approximately 3000 spaces between the two hospital sites. We have a large courier contract for moving all goods and specimens. So there's a lot goods and specimens moving, and in response to Covid-19 we've actually been delivering drugs to patients, to prevent longer queues within the hospital, or a need to travel in just for drugs. We also have a taxi contract, which we manage. And that's used a lot by staff patients as well. And then, in addition to all of that, we have our active travel, making sure that we're providing adequate cycle parking, bike-to-work schemes and the like. So we have to do all of that as well.

Simon: Yeah - it sounds like a huge role David. And I know when we've been talking previously, you told me that maybe a lot of the other trusts split these responsibilities across multiple people and departments. So, is there a benefit to you having it all controlled by one area of the organisation?

David: I think so and I've picked this up in my role as the chair of the NPAG groups that I attend - when transport's fragmented, if you've got different departments running courier and taxi and the likes, you don't have your eye on everything. And it ends up being a huge financial cost to the Trust, because there's replication of services. You've got individual departments or areas using different types of transport - and not always necessarily the right choice. So, to have it all brought under one roof, the benefit is we're very aware of the vast majority of transport movements and requirements for logistics and movement of staff etcetera within our organisation. And that helps us to make sure that we're choosing the right kind of transport, or managing costs. We're trying to keep everything joined together, and that has a huge advantage.

Simon: So with such a large remit then, what do you focus on most?

David: If I'm honest, car parking probably is about 10% of the role, but takes about 90% of my time - because it is so sensitive and contentious within the NHS. So car parking takes a great deal of my time. But most recently as well, we've introduced the new 'Driving at Work' handbook, so we've got to be aware of changes to the law and changes to the way things are going, to make sure the organisation is safe, and that our staff who are using these vehicles are safe, and correctly insured and mobile. So, the bulk of my time tends to be taken up on car parking, but I do focus quite a bit on how we're going to go forward with additional EV infrastructure. And we were the first trust in the world to declare a climate emergency - so there's a real drive at the moment to get our carbon emissions down, there's a lot of focus on the business miles that are being done; the trips that are being done to and from the hospital by staff, patients and visitors; and the use of our own vehicles as well.

Simon: You mentioned you got a new 'Driving for Work' policy - so presumably ensuring everything's done properly and your legal responsibilities are met is pretty important. What are the main challenges you face with the policy and that kind of thing?

David: If I'm honest with you, the main challenge we face with the policy is probably raising awareness. We have an organisation with 16,000 staff, there's a lot of cross-site movement, and it's making sure that where we do have staff who are using their cars for work - and that can be simple things from driving from one site to another, or going to a meeting in their car – understanding that is business use. And we've found ways of integrating them into parking policy, so no one will get a dual-site permit unless we've got confirmation that all of those checks have been done. And at the moment with our appraisal process - policies are being updated, and I'm integrating these changes into the appraisal process as well.

Simon: That's really good that you include it in the appraisal. So presumably driver communication is a key part of the role then. Hospital trusts, traditionally, are really big employers, aren't they? So, give us an idea of scale for the Newcastle Trust, and how big a challenge driver communication is, so that you can ensure standards are met across the whole workforce.

David: Well, the size of the organisation - we are one of the largest trusts in the UK. And we have 16,000 staff - a large number of staff who are using their vehicles for work - so, we have decided that the most appropriate way to make sure that we raise awareness of this policy, and raise awareness of staff responsibilities and organisation responsibilities to ensure the staff are safe, is to build into the annual appraisal process. Every member of staff is asked, as part of their appraisal, 'are you ever using your car for work, and if you are, you need to do X, Y and Z... and you must be aware of this policy', and the manager knows that those licence checks, those insurance checks, those vehicle checks have to be done on a daily basis. And then they're accountable for it as well, to prove that those checks are done.

Simon: So, how big is your grey fleet?

David: Well, I would estimate that my grey fleet's probably in the region of about 4500 - 5000 vehicles.

Simon: Wow.

David: There's a risk that those staff, because they have their cars at work, will use it to go to a meeting, or use it to go and quickly run something somewhere else, or use it to go and run to the hospital.

Simon: Yes. And I wanted to talk a little bit about fatigue, because that's often identified as a common problem for staff with long shifts and night work. How much of a problem is fatigue for your trust? And how do you try to manage that from a road risk perspective?

David: There's obviously other policies within the organisation around health and wellbeing, and supporting staff. There's a European Working Time Directive, which is applied to medical staff, and obviously their hours. And often there are managers, and I can only speak for my own staff as well, where you don't necessarily know what someone's home life is like, and what their quality of sleep is like, and how they're living their life. But you would hope as managers that you are picking up signs of fatigue from staff.

Simon: I've heard of a couple of cases, for instance, where people... surgeons or consultants have actually been involved in fatal accidents on the way home because they're too tired. And I think this is common in any walk of life, not just the NHS. But, the shift pattern probably makes it quite a common challenge in the NHS, where people are working long shifts and they are really tired, and maybe they should stay overnight somewhere or have a rest. But there's that instinct - "I've got to get home, I want to see my family, I want to sleep in my own bed" - but they're too tired really to drive home. And actually, even if they do drive home, the journey might be such that they don't get enough sleep before they're back on for another shift the next day. Do you have policies to try and mitigate that?

David: Yes. As I say, our working time directives and the likes - policies are there, we've got policies around the health and wellbeing of staff, even coming down to our taxi policy... Our taxi policy is also geared then to say "we will provide taxis to staff if there's fatigue... if they've worked long shifts and they're not up for driving". All of those support mechanisms are there. The challenge remains, I suppose, of letting everyone know what is available, and what they should be looking at, and what they should be doing.

Simon: Everyone's working environment has been turned on its head in the last year, obviously because of Covid. How has that impacted on your operations, with the various restrictions to do business as normal?

David: I think the past 14-15 months has been an incredibly challenging time for everyone, and the NHS as well. But the changes operationally, I suppose... we've had less vehicles coming into the organisation. We've had big challenges on car parking, obviously, as public transport was restricted and staff were naturally very nervous about coming into work on public transport and then potentially spreading infection into the hospital. And obviously a lot of the community work slowed right down as well, because there was no face-to-face contact. We're slowly moving back into a period of recovery, and this is actually proving more challenging than the changes we had to make for Covid in the first place.

Covid is still here, but we've got waiting lists and we need to start driving up our activity again, to concentrate on helping patients with other medical conditions that still exist. But what's interesting in the way that we've changed... what we're doing now we're having Zoom calls and podcasts, and it's much more commonplace to have meetings remotely. We have staff working at home as well. There has always been this challenge of "we must have this meeting" and you all go sit around the table and meet. Now people are used to using Teams. So you'll certainly see those changes in business travel coming forwards. We will see reduced business travel, of that I have no doubt.

Simon: What about patient services, then, if people are less likely to come in, because they can't get in maybe, or they don't want to use public transport? How are you supporting patients?

David: So we now have a much higher level of remote consultations as well. We now have patients who are being seen remotely, using various multimedia platforms, or telephone calls and the like. And even our outpatient medicines deliveries - we're delivering up to 3000 prescriptions per month to patients. And a lot of them are hospital-only drugs, so they can't be collected at the local pharmacy. We're avoiding that queuing at pharmacies, and additionally we're actually saving the trip into the hospital - because in some cases, patients were coming into the hospital solely to pick up the hospital drugs so all of those trips can be reduced as well.

Simon: And are you using your own vehicles and drivers for that drugs delivery service?

David: Yeah, we have a Trust courier contract, and we're using them. But we've also started using volunteers. So we now have volunteers also delivering that service for us.

Simon: Wow. So, with that service you've got, presumably, normal courier services with cars and vans, and we've mentioned taxis before so you plainly use quite a lot of external transport providers, and I guess you use some for patient services as well as for the drug delivery service we've just been talking about. And it looks like that's grown quite a bit over recent months. There's something I refer to as procured transport, where you're subcontracting out the delivery of the actual transport service itself, but you're not necessarily outsourcing the risk - you've still got overall responsibilities to ensure that service is delivered. And you've kind of referred to that with making sure your volunteers understand the rules. Do you vet these providers - couriers and taxi firms - to ensure they're managing their own risks properly?

David: Oh, absolutely. It's key. It's a key part of the tender specification. But it's also a key part of their key performance indicators that they give us at their review meetings, where we're asking for evidence that this work is being done and maintained. It's very easy for anyone to tick a box to say "yes, we'll do X, Y and Z", but there's very much a responsibility on us as an organisation to make sure that they're doing exactly what we've asked them to, in terms of driver checks, vehicle tracking, vehicle checks. Our courier company are doing significant miles, and it's vital that we set that objective to our transport providers to make sure that they're fully aware of the risks, and then to evidence them when we meet them.

Simon: Yeah, I think it's really important - and especially when you're, effectively, paying these people with public money, and so it's only right that it's expected that they manage that work-related road risk to a legally compliant and appropriate level, isn't it?

David: Yeah, and very important as well is they still represent our organisation. They are still a representative of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne Hospitals, because by right they are delivering Trust services. And therefore, what we expect of these transport providers and what we expect of the service is very much an awareness that our name is still on the door. They are representatives of this organisation, and we expect the same levels of quality, professional and compassionate care and service delivery for our patients.

Simon: Just looking to the future for a moment, what do you think your biggest challenges are going to be in the years ahead?

David: Well we've already implemented a diesel ban - so none of our new fleet vehicles coming through can be diesel. And at the moment, we're actually quite far down the line to progressing that to a total combustion fuel engine ban.

We've started to try and move away from combustion fuels altogether. I think that's a challenge at the moment on larger vehicles, such as vans, because the market doesn't yet have the EV range needed for everything - particularly vans. But that will certainly change, the market will lead itself on that, and that will change and we'll be able to implement that much more readily in the next couple of years. Even on our salary sacrifice scheme - where staff can lease cars to the organisation, in essence - we're looking for that to be only ULEV or ZEV vehicles; zero-emission or ultra-low emission vehicles only available to lease.

Simon: This links in with something you said earlier, about your targets for reducing your environmental footprint and working towards net carbon zero. You're the first healthcare authority to set these really quite stringent targets, aren't you?

David: We are, yes. We were the first healthcare authority in the world, I believe, to declare a climate emergency. And we have a sustainability manager in this organisation who is incredibly driven to make us succeed, and really lead the way in our drive to reduce our emissions - and to achieve net carbon zero. It's something we're all very passionate about, it's embedded in the organisation - this ethos that everything is very much around that. And our own chief executive, Dame Jackie Daniel, is very much driving forward the need to be carbon zero. Newcastle University, who are across the road from our main site in the city, they've declared a climate emergency, and our local authority have declared a climate emergency. So we've got a real collaboration of effort on making sure that we can drive down those emissions.

Simon: Yeah - I think it's really important, and it's obviously front-of-mind for most fleets now, that transition to EVs and striving towards net zero for everyone.

David: It is, and there are challenges around making sure that ambulances spend the vast majority of their time at a hospital. And making sure that we put the infrastructure in to enable the ambulance service to transition their fleet, by saying "don't worry when you bring patients to this hospital - you can put some miles into your vehicle to carry on and stay on the road for longer". You know, making sure that we have infrastructure in to keep our courier vehicles charged up via rapid charges and the like, so they can keep delivering our services. Looking towards more [????? 20:22]. But even as far as our taxi contract - we put out the taxi contract and we say "we want to see reduced emissions in all taxi fleet over the next few years, to the point where we say by X year, you will not have any engine combustion taxis allowed to come on this site - we will expect EV". 

Simon: When we've talked previously, you've talked as well about trying to reduce the number of transport movements on and off the main hospital site. And, one of the things that you would try to do in the future is to maybe have deliveries in and out of a central hub off- site, and then that would reduce the traffic in and out of the hospital site. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

David: It's something that we're starting to work on. And it's an idea that, I think, many Trusts should be looking at now. All Trusts have huge volumes of goods coming into the hospitals on a daily basis. And invariably, the main process is that those drugs are delivered by HGVs, couriers, LGV vehicles and the likes. And it will take a long time for those vehicles to go EV. But then there's the capacity within the hospital itself, to accept those deliveries, which are then held and then moved internally to the various destinations, via a team of porters on the ground. And I feel that there's a lot of scope in having an off-site consolidation centre - for want of a better word - which means that all deliveries are taken to a central warehouse out of city or whatever, and then we do direct delivery to ward from that consolidation centre, using EV vehicles doing smaller shuttles. What it means is that rather than the goods vehicles coming onto site, and a necessary - potentially clinical - space being taken up... hospitals will grow, the population's growing, and hospitals need to expand so do we use valuable hospital space to move things round, or can that space potentially be used for clinical expansion, with off-site storage at a warehouse for goods and then bringing goods in directly to source and then bringing things back out?

Simon: That sounds like really exciting developments for the future. I've got one final question for you, David. You've been managing transport for many years, and you've got a complex role. So what's the most important thing you've learned about the role in that time? Could you give our listeners one last pearl of wisdom?

David: Yeah. I love what I do, I love the challenge of it - and that comes from me as an individual. I think what I've probably learned most is just how much transport impacts on every aspect of hospital operations. And whether that's the patients coming in; the staff getting to work and getting home; all of the logistics that are involved in bringing everything in and out; and moving patients and services around... without transport - and effective transport - it grinds to a halt. Transport is absolutely a key component of healthcare. It has so many impacts on operations, finances, health and wellbeing. Emissions can affect health, so if we generate more emissions we're actually creating poorer health for the long term. So there's a huge impact. I’ve learned just how much transport impacts on everything but quite surprisingly, how it's not really a major consideration within a lot of organisations.

Simon: It's so important. David, I really appreciate you sharing your insights with us - thank you so much for being on the show.

David: Thank you for having me.

In this episode of Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, Simon Turner discusses the thorny issue of driver distraction with Dr Gemma Briggs from the Open University.

Gemma is an applied cognitive psychologist who has been researching driver inattention for over 15 years. She has lectured and written extensively on the attentional and perceptual issues caused by phone use when driving and has worked closely with several road safety charities to promote and share research findings.

Gemma and Simon discuss why a driver on the phone will suffer from 'inattention blindness'

What does the science say about our ability to multitask and take a call whilst driving

They look at the shared responsibility between employers and drivers, and their social responsibility to other road users, and discuss how management can often undermine the whole process.

Finally they look at some of the free resources that are available to help employers and drivers to understand and combat distracted driving

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/driver-distraction-the-inconvenient-truth/

Useful Links

Driving for Better Business Resources on driver distraction and using mobile phones while driving

Search Results - Driving for Better Business

Driving change website: https://drivingchange.webflow.io/

Can you count the cars challenge:  https://youtu.be/XRXdmmTk32I

The mobile office challenge: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/health-sports-psychology/psychology/are-you-driven-distraction

Video on distracted driving: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzYAOOyVp7w&list=PLiUzMkrWK6CuyHzDV2ShdYEQgBYNC1N3B&index=2&t=8s this was linked to a brainteaser task (see attached) where people are asked to rate the behaviours in order of danger when driving.

The Inconvenient Truth About Mobile Phone Distraction: Understanding the Means, Motive and Opportunity for Driver Resistance to Legal and Safety Messages: https://academic.oup.com/bjc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/bjc/azab038/6262317?login=true

Transcript

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk – a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles, and want to reduce road risk in their organisation. I’m Simon Turner, and I’m the campaign manager for Driving for Better Business. In this episode, we’re going to discuss the thorny issue of driver distraction with Dr Gemma Briggs from the Open University. Gemma is an applied cognitive psychologist who has been researching driver inattention for over 15 years. She’s lectured and written extensively on the attentional and perceptual issues caused by phone use when driving, and has worked closely with several road safety charities to promote and share her research findings. Gemma and I are going to discuss why a driver on the phone will suffer from inattention blindness; what the science says about our ability to multitask and take a call while driving; we look at the shared responsibility between employers and drivers, and their social responsibility to other road users; and we also discuss how management can very often undermine the whole process. And finally, we look at some of the free resources that are available to help employers and drivers understand and combat distracted driving.

(transition)

Simon: Hi Gemma, and welcome to the podcast!

Gemma: Hi! Thanks for having me.

Simon: So Gemma, perhaps you could start by just telling us a little bit more about the type of research that you do.

Gemma: Sure. I’m a cognitive psychologist, and predominantly I’m really interested in how people pay attention, and how they perceive dynamic and changing scenes. The biggest application of that theoretical basis for me is looking at mobile phone use by drivers, so I’m really interested in what happens within a driver’s brain while they engage in a secondary task, such as having a conversation on the phone. I’m interested in what they do with their attention – do they try to divide their attention? Now research has looked into whether that’s actually possible or not – or whether – more likely perhaps – they shift their attention between those two tasks, and what that means for their performance in both tasks. How does their driving performance deteriorate? How does their performance in the phone conversation cope? How well do they cope with that situation – and what do they get out of it? What we’ve been able to share, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in more detail later anyway, is that it’s a really big problem in terms of driving performance. When we try to divide or shift our attention in this way, we can come unstuck.

Simon: Yeah. I doubt there’s anyone listening to this who doesn’t know that using a handheld phone while driving is illegal, but using a hands-free phone is legal. The implication of that for many is that hands-free is safe – or it wouldn’t be legal. So is it safer? What does your research show?

Gemma: Sure. So in research terms – it’s certainly not just my research or my collaborative research that’s looked into this – but what we do know is that hands-free phone use offers no safety benefit over handheld phones. So regardless of whether you’re physically holding your phone or not, you’re 4 times more likely to be involved in some kind of incident or crash. Your hazard perception ability vastly decreases. Your eye movements will change – so you’ll look around the scene less, and that can have implications for what you see and you don’t see. And those hazards that you do notice, you’ll take significantly longer to react to. So our research that I’ve done collaboratively largely with Graham Hole from the University of Sussex has looked into some of the specifics of that.

We wanted to identify – we know this is a problem, but why is it a problem? And it seems that it’s cognitive distraction that’s the issue. It’s not really whether you have both hands on the steering wheel and both eyes on the road ahead, because what we’ve been able to identify is that you can be in that situation – hands appropriately on 10 to 2 on the wheel and eyes looking at the road ahead – but if your mind is elsewhere, on a phone conversation, then you can miss things that happen right in front of your eyes. One particular experiment that we carried out put drivers in a driving simulator, and we tracked their eye movements. And we had this theory that perhaps the mobile phone conversation is drawing on cognitive resources that are actually needed for the driving task, and that’s why there’s a problem in terms of noticing and reacting to hazards. So, we asked some of our participants to complete a secondary task – a phone task, hands-free – which induced imagery. We asked them things like “true or false: in a rowing boat, a rower sits with his back to the front of the boat?”, “do cows have hanging ears?”. All of these kind of things that in order to answer, you probably have to conjure up an image in your head. We had another group of participants who weren’t distracted, and yet another group of participants who were distracted by non-imagery inducing statements – things that you either know or you don’t know, and they needed to verify. So, “the capital of Spain is Madrid”. Things that you probably don’t need to picture. And what we found was that it seems when people have a mobile phone conversation, they tend to picture their conversation partner; where they are, what they’re discussing, what they’re talking about, and you spontaneously create these mental images. The same brain areas that are needed for visual perception are also needed to create these mental images, and that can explain why a driver can look directly at something – and we know they’ve looked directly at it because we’ve tracked their eye movements – yet they’ve failed to react to it. When you ask them later, they say they didn’t see it – so in that particular experiment, those participants who were distracted by imagery inducing statements noticed far fewer hazards than any other participants. Those who were distracted by non-imagery were also worse than those who drove undistracted. But those distracted by imagery showed the worst performance overall. So, they either didn’t spot hazards, or if they did, they took up to a second longer to react to them, even if that hazard occurred right in front of them where we could demonstrate that their eye was directly pointed and trying to take in that information. It  demonstrates a phenomenon known as inattention blindness; looking without seeing, so from that research – and we’ve built on that, and many others have done relevant work in that area – we can say that drivers on the phone, whether handheld or hands-free, can suffer from inattention blindness. They can look directly at things, yet not see them – and because they don’t see them, they don’t react to them.

Simon: So is that because the brain can’t physically hold two images at once? It can’t process the visual information from what’s going on in front of the driver at the same time as creating this mental image – it’s kind of one or the other?

Gemma: Kind of. I think it’s probably fair to say that the brain can attempt to process both things at once. But I think the issue is that we tend to try and think of our brain as being similar to a computer, in the sense that we can have multiple streams of information being processed at the same time, and that we can divide that beam of attention – but actually, what we know, is that we tend to switch between tasks, rather than divide our attention. That shift can be very quick, so much so that we don’t necessarily notice it ourselves. But there will be points in time when our brain isn’t actively processing the driving scene ahead of us – the information that we’re taking in – because it’s busy processing something else; a mental image, whatever that might be. So, it’s competition for cognitive resources for these two tasks. Both tasks are drawing on this same pool of resources, if you like, and like in any competition, one task tends to win. So, if it’s the phone conversation task that wins, and takes those visual resources away from the driving task, then the driver’s eyes can be on the road, but they’re not processing that information all the time.

Simon: So that sounds like we’re talking about, effectively, multitasking there, doesn’t it?

Gemma: Exactly.

Simon: And many people believe they can multitask – “I can drive and I can use the phone at the same time” – is that not true?

Gemma: It’s not that it’s not true, it’s that I think our understanding of what multitasking is, is distinct and different to what we know about how the brain works. What we know about multitasking is that yes, sometimes we can maintain a couple of tasks at the same time, but what we’re doing is we’re shifting between those two tasks. We’re not keeping them going at a constant level simultaneously. We’re shifting. What we also know is that when we multitask, generally speaking, both tasks will be performed worse than if we tried to do them individually. So it’s far better, cognitively speaking, to focus on one task and then do another, rather than trying to do them simultaneously. Of course, that’s not practical all the time in everyday life. So we talk about multitasking, and we talk about the importance of multitasking, but our understanding of what that means is quite different from what our brain can actually achieve.

Simon: So, if drivers who haven’t had an accident while they’re on the phone – and there are obviously many of those – it’s kind of believing that they’re a bit invincible. They think “I haven’t had an accident so far…”. It sounds like they’re not recognising the fact that they’ve missed so much of what’s been going on while they’ve been on the phone. They don’t perceive there’s a risk, because they haven’t been aware of the risk while it was happening.

Gemma: Absolutely – that taps into a really key thing in this whole piece of research, which is that around 80% of drivers consider themselves to be better than average at driving – which, statistically is possible but is also highly unlikely! Someone needs to be average, someone needs to be below average. So, if you’re driving along and you haven’t had a crash, you haven’t been involved in any kind of incident, you tend to be – if you’re distracted – unaware of how unaware you are.

What will happen is other road users – whether that be other drivers, pedestrians, whatever – will be compensating for your lack of awareness. So, in the absence of any kind of catastrophic crash – which you obviously become aware of – a distracted driver, generally speaking, will be unaware of how many near-misses they’ve had, how many times they’ve driven too close to the vehicle in front, if they’ve veered out of their lane – so it’s kind of like a confirmation bias for these drivers; the majority think they’re better than average, they’ve never had a crash, they’ve never had an incident whilst using their hands-free phone, therefore they’re fine. And what’s interesting is that same group of drivers – the majority – will comment that they fully support laws banning mobile phone use, banning handheld phone use, and many will even go so far as to say “any type of mobile phone use is really a danger and I can understand that, and other people shouldn’t do it – but not me, because I’m better than average, and I’ve never been involved in any kind of incident”.

So it’s a real tension, because you present data such as ours, empirical data that looks at reaction times and eye movements and all of those kind of, if you like, geeky areas of research that can explain why it’s a problem cognitively. But we’re all human. So when we communicate that to people, it’s quite common, in fact it’s extremely common that there’s a defence of that. You know, this is really inconvenient research. People don’t want to be told that they can’t multitask, because that’s what we’re told we should constantly be doing. And they don’t want to be told that hands-free mobile phone use is any different to talking to a passenger in the vehicle, because this stuff is all pre-installed in their vehicles, and they’re expected to use it by family, friends, employers or whatever. So there’s a real tension between what we understand about how our brain works, and how we can communicate these messages in a convincing way, so that people can’t just say “no, sorry – it’s no different”.

Simon: You mentioned passengers there – one of the most frequent excuses or challenges to this is “well how is phone distraction different to talking to a passenger in the car?”. How is it different?

Gemma: Well it taps into what we said about imagery but also it’s an issue of shared environment. So, a passenger within your vehicle can obviously see what you can see, they can see the challenges that you are facing and can regulate their conversation accordingly. By that, I mean hopefully they will stop talking if they can see that you’re facing a particularly challenging driving situation. Or they might even help – pointing out a vehicle that you haven’t perhaps spotted – whereas someone on the phone doesn’t have the benefit of that shared environment, so they’re going to continue to demand your precious attention. In fact, if you stop talking – which is a common thing; your brain will say I need to process this information, I’m going to stop responding to another task – if you stop talking momentarily on a mobile phone conversation, your conversation partner is likely to say “are you still there?” and demand your attention back to them, so, this issue of shared environment is a big difference in terms of the distraction imposed by a passenger compared to a mobile phone conversation.

Simon: Yeah. I want to delve a little bit now into what employers can do about this. This is one of the major driving at work risks for employers – and I don’t think there are many employers that don’t see it as a risk – they just don’t know how to manage it effectively. And, I had Mark Cartwright on the show recently from Highways England talking about Operation Tramline, which is where the police roam the motorways in unmarked lorry cabs taking film of poor driving behaviour. And one of the most common offences that they see – whether it’s truck drivers, van drivers or car drivers, because it catches offences in all of those different vehicle types – is phone distraction. And a lot of handheld phone use – so employers clearly need to set down rules, and that means putting guidance on mobile phone use in their ‘Driving for Work’ policy. What do you think that guidance needs to include?

Gemma: It’s a really tricky one, because obviously, if you’re driving for work, for a living, then your employer has a responsibility to keep you safe – but of course, it’s kind of a shared responsibility as well. The first thing I always say to people making policy for workplace driving safety is that you need to be aware of that shared responsibility. Your employer needs to be very clear on their position on phone use – and of course, handheld phone use is illegal, so that position should be clear, but it can still be even more clearly communicated – if you are found to be texting at traffic lights, or checking your next drop, or doing any kind of handheld activity on a phone, you will lose your job.

From the flip side, of course, from the employee’s side, it’s your driver’s licence. It’s your job, so there’s that shared responsibility. But in terms of what the policy needs to set out; whether there’s a ban on any type of phone use – which many companies are now taking on board – or if it’s just a ban on illegal phone use – you would hope that the existence of the law would cover that, but as I’ve said, it doesn’t.  As you’ve said, it demonstrably doesn’t.

I think there’s a lot to be done in terms of policy relating to education, so explaining why it’s an issue, not just that it is, or that you’ll get sacked if you’re caught using it. There needs to be a level of accountability, but that needs to be explained and made clear to drivers -evidence-based education such as ours can help with that, but in other clear policy terms, we need an agreement between managers and drivers about what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable. If you have an all-out ban on any type of phone use by your drivers, then you as a manager should not have an expectation that your driver will answer a phone call at any time that you call them. You have to have a clear policy that says ‘at this time in your working day, you need to be parked up and available’. There are big challenges there when we talk about delivery drivers, for example. They have multiple drops, and they need to get updated routes and information like that, so, I’m not naive to the fact that it’s actually a massive challenge if we try to ban any type of phone use in this area – but individual companies must have a really specific, clear policy on what is and isn’t acceptable, that is followed by all members of that organisation. It will sound really obvious, but we know from the Driving for Better Business survey that came out a couple of years ago is that there is a real disconnect between what management expect and what employees expect, and how that ties in with company policy.

Simon: Yeah. I’ve spoken to a number of fleet operators now who have introduced zero tolerance phone policies, and the most common argument for not doing it is that “our staff need to be contactable, we need to be able to update them”. But most of the companies I know that have instigated a zero tolerance phone policy have been able to make it work. They have times when the drivers can stop and get updates. The drivers understand when a safe time to answer the phone and when to update is. And it doesn’t impact their productivity if managed correctly. But I think the key thing in this that you’ve mentioned there, and the survey that we did, showed that 49% of senior executives expected their drivers to answer the phone while driving – and many of those had policies which told the drivers that they weren’t allowed to answer the phone.

So it’s so important that everybody in the company leads by example – if you’ve got the executives disrespecting the policy and phoning up the drivers, then the drivers have no respect for the policy either, do they?

Gemma: Absolutely. A company policy has to apply to every employee, and if there’s even a whiff of the fact that senior executives are allowed loopholes, then you won’t get compliance from other employees because it’s a demonstration that the policy isn’t effective and won’t be enforced. So that comes back to another thing that we know from psychological research – you need a clear policy of course, but if that policy is broken by any employee, you need an appropriate approach to dealing with that. Because otherwise the policy doesn’t work as a deterrent to doing what you shouldn’t be doing. As long as there’s a clear policy, and it’s backed up by deterrents in the sense that “if you’re caught doing this, there will be a consequence, regardless of who you are – the CEO or one of the delivery drivers – there will be consequences”. But in order for that to happen, there needs to be a credible threat of being caught. If drivers know that there’s no way of it being detected that they’re sending a quick text, or they’re answering a phone call from their manager and their manager said “it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone”, then it’s not going to work either. It’s a real challenge. You need that kind of threat – which sounds strong – but you need a threat in order for deterrents to work, and that needs to be backed up by education. So as you’re saying, those companies where they have got an all-out ban, and it is working, and drivers understand why it’s in place and understand when they can stop and take calls, I would assume that that’s because they’ve got a clear policy, and they’ve explained why. People want to know why.

Simon: The resources for drivers – educating drivers is a really good point. We’ve just produced something called the Van Driver Toolkit, which is a series of safety updates for drivers which are free to access for employers – and one of those safety updates is around mobile phone distraction. And it shows the consequences of doing it, there are some helpful tips on how to not do it, it explains – in very simple terms, in a very short piece of collateral – what the drivers need to know so they can make their own decisions, informed decisions, around that. Employers are free to download those and share them with their drivers, so I’ll share the link to that in the show notes at the end.

So, we talked about the survey Driving for Better Business had done earlier, and something else that came out of that survey was that – and I was quite staggered by this statistic – 1 in 6, so 17% of those who drove for work – having surveyed over 1000 drivers; it was a professionally conducted survey – 1 in 6 of them said they’d been involved in an incident while on the phone to their boss or a colleague – so we’ve got the proof that this is quite clearly a problem for businesses. Now, many of those wouldn’t have been injury collisions. But it just shows how reducing phone use can reduce the chance of even damage only incidents, which then disrupt the business and result in expensive damage repairs. I mean, that’s another reason for businesses to look seriously at curtailing phone use while driving, isn’t it?

Gemma: Absolutely. In terms of costs, of course. As you say, not all incidents will involve contact collisions, or they might and you’ve got damage of course. But there’s also the level of social responsibility for companies. Of course the company wants to save money. Of course the company wants to keep their employees safe. But equally, they’ve got a social responsibility to keep other road users safe from their potentially distracted drivers, so there’s a reputational issue as well, of course. You know, all of us who use the roads have this social responsibility to interact appropriately on the road network. Now, again, that might sound very naïve, but that’s how the system ultimately has to work, and when it breaks down it can have quite catastrophic impacts of course. So yes, it’s certainly in the interests of individual companies, as well as wider society, to tackle this problem, because we do know it’s a growing problem; not just amongst people who drive for work, but amongst the general public. Self-reported phone use – handheld and hands-free – is on the up. It’s increasing, and so are the number of police-recorded incidents that are attributed to distraction – so it’s a real problem.

Simon: Yeah, it is. And we’ve seen that from our research as well, and as I say, the Operation Tramline footage that we’ve seen. Gemma, have you got any resources that we can share with listeners that might help them manage phone distraction among their drivers?

Gemma: Yes, certainly – because I’m based at the Open University, we’ve got an online learning platform that’s entirely free, called OpenLearn and myself and my colleague Dr Jim Turner have created a couple of interactive activities that are freely available that sit on OpenLearn. These are evidence-based activities. They’re gamified, if you like. The idea is, it takes about 10 minutes to complete. You go along and you experience distraction for yourself. In the first one that we’ve got, called ‘Are You a Focused Driver?’, you watch a very quick series of clips – some of which may contain a hazard – and you’re asked to look out for those hazards. And at the same time, you receive a phone call from a very demanding friend who’s giving you a shopping list of things that you need to remember. The idea is that you’re engaging in a cognitively demanding task, as well as driving – as well as looking for hazards. You’re then asked a couple of questions about that phone task, about what you remember, because we want to know how you perform on both tasks. And then you’re asked about which hazards you notice and which you don’t, and people are given immediate feedback, so they get a score for their phone conversation answers and they get a score for their hazard perception. It’s been done by thousands of people. What we’ve found is that people tend to do well in one task or the other, not both. Which is entirely backing up the research that we’ve done, and many others have done too, so it’s a nice little fun and non-judgmental approach to education, and once you’ve completed the task, there are further links where you can find out more information. There’s a video of me talking about research in this area, and again, explaining why it’s a problem and why you might have just completed this and not done too well.

The second one we launched at the end of last year. It was called ‘The Mobile Office Challenge’ and this one might be particularly relevant to people who drive for work of course. The idea is that, obviously a lot of people drive for work, so their car does in effect become a mobile office. And in this one we were quite interested in looking at driver confidence that you’ve noticed all of the hazards, and that you’ve performed well in that phone conversation. Without giving too much away – you are put in the position, you’re told that you’re a wedding planner driving between appointments and you receive a phone call from a couple whose wedding you’re planning, so that you can plan their wedding appropriately. At the same time, you need to look out for hazards, and then you’re asked some questions along the way; how confident are you that you’ve noticed all of these hazards? How confident are you that you can meet your client’s needs. Again, unsurprisingly, we found that people tend to do well in one or the other task. In this one, there’s a nice distinction because you get to first complete this hazard perception task with a phone conversation, and then you do it without a phone conversation, so you can compare your own performance between being distracted and not being distracted. In terms of hazard perception and how well you do, unsurprisingly, those doing just the hazard perception task tend to perform much better. And then again there’s more information and more links and FAQs at the end. The idea is that these are freely available, they’ve been adopted by various police forces who have used them as roadside education tools, for example. The idea is that it’s explaining why it’s a problem – not just that it is – and allowing people to witness their own distraction, which means they can’t then say “yeah, but this doesn’t mean me”.because they have seen their results themselves.

Simon: Those sound fantastic. I’ve seen some of those myself and we’ve got them on the Driving for Better Business website, so I’ll make sure all of the links to those resources are in the show notes, so listeners can access those and download them. Gemma, phone distraction is obviously one of the key things that employers and fleet operators have got to manage – I really appreciate you sharing your insights with us. That has been fantastic, thank you so much for being on the show.

Gemma: You’re welcome, thanks for having me.

Simon: And thank you everyone for listening!

Simon Turner is joined in this podcast by Mark Cartwright from Highways England.

Mark was previously at the Freight Transport Association where he was head of vans and light commercial vehicles, and was the brains behind the van excellence programme.

He now brings over 30 years of experience to Highways England as head of their Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention Team.

In this podcast I talk to Mark about the lack of awareness among some van drivers and operators of their obligations – specifically around issues like overloading and vehicle maintenance.

We discuss why some van operators seem to think the rules don’t apply to them and various ways they and their drivers can get caught out.

We talk about the new resources that Mark’s team have developed in collaboration with DfBB to tackle driver wellbeing and driver communication challenges.

And finally we talk about the new Euro NCAP van safety ratings and why van operators should be demanding safer vehicles for their drivers.

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/van-drivers-and-van-operators-training-resources/

Useful Links:

Highways England resources for commercial vehicle operators and drivers

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?category=CVIP

DfBB Resources: Loading and load security

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/resources/search-results/?section=325&category=Load%20Security

CALM Driver

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/calmdriver/

DfBB Van Driver Toolkit

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/van-driver-toolkit/

Euro NCAP Van Safety Ratings

https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/articles/how-safe-are-your-vans/

https://www.euroncap.com/en/vehicle-safety/safety-campaigns/2021-commercial-van-safety/

Transcript

Simon: Welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk, a podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles and want to reduce road risk in their organisation.

I’m Simon Turner and I’m the Campaign Manager for Driving for Better Business, and I’m joined today by Mark Cartwright from Highways England. Mark was previously at the Freight Transport Association, where he was Head of Vans and Light Commercial Vehicles, and where he was the brains behind the Van Excellence programme. He now brings over 30 years of experience to Highways England as Head of their Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention Team. In this podcast, I talk to Mark about the lack of awareness among some van drivers and operators about their obligations, and specifically around issues like overloading and vehicle maintenance. We discuss why some van operators seem to think the rules don’t apply to them, and the various ways that both they and their drivers can get caught out. Then we talk about the new resources that Mark’s team have developed in collaboration with Driving for Better Business to tackle driver wellbeing and driver communication challenges. And finally, we talk about the new Euro NCAP van safety ratings, and why van operators should be demanding safer vehicles for their drivers.

Simon: Hi Mark, welcome to the show.

Mark: Hi Simon.

Simon: Mark, you’ve obviously got years of experience with commercial vehicles – perhaps we could start by just talking a little bit about your role with Highways England – what does that entail and where’s your main focus at the moment?

Mark: Thanks Simon. It’s an interesting role, I guess, the job title, Head of Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention really tells you all you need to know – it’s very much a ‘does what it says on the can’ kind of role. I guess in terms of our activities and our focus, the team has always had quite a focus on heavy commercial vehicles, on trucks and in particular their condition on the road, their roadworthiness, the state of their loading, etcetera. And we’re keeping going in that, because clearly that’s an important area for us, but we’re moving more and more of a focus onto light commercial vehicles, and as part and parcel of that, looking at how we influence the behaviours of drivers and their managers to be doing the right thing on the road.

Simon: There’s obviously a huge amount of more vans on the road than there are trucks so that seems like a sensible direction to take, to focus more on the light commercials, as well. What are the main problems you see with those?

Mark: Yeah right, I mean just in terms of numbers around four and a half million vans on the road at the moment compared to probably somewhere in the region of 420,000 trucks so you know, you don’t need to think too long and hard to realise there’s an area of activity there for us.

The work that we’ve been doing, I guess the first thing to say is Highways England has no enforcement powers, so we’re working with our colleagues in enforcement on trying to influence the behaviours of the drivers and managers I mentioned, but to be honest, most of the issues that we find are pretty straightforward stuff.

So there’s a degree of frustration that we find these issues, but I guess there’s an understanding that with the right attitudes they’re actually fairly easy things to fix. So we see overloading – there’s an ongoing lack of awareness, it seems, that the capacity of light commercial vehicles isn’t down to just how much you can actually get on the back, and there are weight limits involved. We see issues around the security of those loads, which of course, given what we do, is a big concern for us. But we also see the kind of road worthiness issues which frankly ought to be being picked up by any kind of cursory pre-use check of the vehicle, before we even get to it. That tells me that, by and large, there’s quite a lack of awareness within drivers and the operators as to the very basics of operating commercial vehicles. A statistic which is quite interesting, I’m sure many of our listeners will be aware of this, is the first-time MOT failure rate on vans is around just shy of 50%. So that’s a vehicle which has been sent in to be checked over – now most of the things that these vans are failing their MOTs on are the kind of thing I’ve mentioned. They’re turning up for an MOT with dodgy tyres or with bulbs that aren’t working, lights that aren’t working, windscreen wipers, all that kind of stuff. And there are all the kinds of things that ought to be picked up by even the most straightforward of pre-use checks on vehicles. So, again, I guess that kind of supports our view that if the vans aren’t being checked the day before they’re going in for their MOT, I’m pretty sure they haven’t been checked on any of the other 364 days that are available to them. So, very frustrating, but the reality of it is, if we can change attitudes, it’s pretty easy to fix.

Simon: With vehicle checks then, do you think it’s part of the problem people just not doing checks, or are they just not doing them often enough?

Mark: I think there are two areas of it, to be honest, I mean one, there’s this lack of awareness that I speak about. And to be honest, I think most of the time it is genuinely a lack of awareness – you know, we see vans being operated by businesses who are very health and safety conscious, very good at managing their health and safety in the primary areas of their business. Whether they be, you know, in the building trades, civil engineers, landscapers, scaffolders, you know, whatever. They’re very good at managing the health and safety, away from the vehicle, but it doesn’t necessarily seem to translate to the vehicle operation which again is, is frustrating but it’s something that, you know, we can address. So I think there’s a lack of awareness in there. The other issue in the van space, with pre-use checks I think, is just the logistics of doing it. In the truck world, a piece of paper served perfectly well for many operators for many, many years – you know, the driver takes some form, fills out the form, hands it in at the gate or the traffic office or whatever. And it’s dealt with as it needs to be dealt with. The problem with vans, or the issue with vans, is a good 80% of them – in our estimation – live outside of somebody’s house so it’s all very well carrying out the check on a piece of paper for example, but what happens to that piece of paper after. So you know we’ve become a big fan of pre-use defect checks apps over the last couple of years because they literally get around that issue of delivering the report from where the vehicle is to the individual that can make the decision as to what happens next

Simon: With the main reasons for MOT failures I think one of the biggest is typically wheel or tyre related, and brake related, which are, you know… tyres are obviously something that should be picked up on a pre-use defect check but when you link that with what you said previously about loading issues that makes it doubly critical doesn’t it?

Mark: Oh absolutely and, you know, I know it’s probably a statement of the blindingly obvious but if you’ve got a truck running at 44 tonnes – it’s got an awful lot more, I don’t want to call it leeway, but it’s got greater margins in terms of its operational capacity than the three and a half tonne van. You know, an overload of a tonne on a van or 500 kilos on a van is a big percentage of overload and you’re going to put that equipment under a lot of strain. It’s not, percentage wise, that big an overload on a truck – not that I’m condoning it at all but the margins of that are clearly significantly less on the light commercial vehicle.

Simon: Is it quite common for overloaded vans to get picked up? I’ve got a DVSA weigh station I think near where I live, and I see plenty of pictures on social media of police, and road policing units that have pulled in overloaded vans that would be comically overloaded if it weren’t so serious, but, you know, is it common that presumably the police know what they’re looking for and the DVSA know what they’re looking for?

Mark: Absolutely. I mean, bear in mind the DVSA by and large, are more concerned with the operator licence classes of vehicles – the trucks, buses and coaches, but they are turning more and more of their resource to the van space. Police, absolutely, both organisations have constraints in the level of resource they put to it. But as we’ve identified with both of those agencies spotting an overloaded van actually isn’t the hardest thing in the world to do, and their strike rate – if I can call it that – when they’re pulling vehicles in is high. But it’s the old issue, there’s so many vans out there. I think weight issues are fairly endemic in the light commercial vehicle sector and you know it’s down to operators and importantly the people who are procuring the work from operators to, to ensure that everybody knows what’s expected of them.

Simon: If a fleet operator has a fleet of vans, and overloading isn’t something that’s occurred to them before, what should they be looking to do – A, to see if it’s an issue, and B, if it is an issue, how do they go about dealing with it?

Mark: You need to be sensible. You need to understand what the weight of the vehicle is to start with and, you know, from an operator’s point of view, please take into account a full fuel tank, and the drivers and the crew that are engaged in the vehicle – you know, some of us can be a fair amount of weight to begin with before you even start with what’s on the back of the vehicle. And, if you’re not sure, take it to the local weighbridge, get it checked out and make sure that you understand what the weight of that vehicle is. Something that we see quite commonly is in what we call the ‘doing van sector’ – so vans that are being used by, you know, engineers and builders and gas fitters and all the rest of it to do their jobs – a mobile shed, kind of van where the vehicle will come out of conversion weighing a smidge under 3500 kilos. And by their nature, drivers and these engineers tend to collect stuff and, you know, we see all kinds of stuff in there which maybe the operator isn’t even aware of. One of the things that I think is absolutely really good best practice, aside from, you know, checking it out at the weighbridge, is for an operator just to take every opportunity that they can to stick their head in the back of their guys’ vans and see what’s in there. We’ve already mentioned an awful lot of vans are based at drivers’ premises at the drivers’ homes. It’s good to take the opportunity to have a look in the back of the van and make sure what you’re comfortable with what you’re seeing in there – not just from a weight issue but also from the security overload issue, again that’s a parallel problem that we see an awful lot.

Simon: We know that truck operators are covered by lots of regulations – so they have operator licences and they’re checked and regulated by the traffic commissioners and if they get caught doing stuff wrong, they get pulled in – that will have to go to an inquiry with the traffic commissioners. So there’s a common misconception I guess that vans aren’t subject to the same rules or indeed any rules at all. What rules do apply to van operators?

Mark: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head there, Simon, in terms of the common misconceptions. Because we come across an awful lot of van operators who frankly don’t understand that there are regulations. I think the best way I’ve ever seen that message got across is via a fairly senior police officer that we’ve done a load of work with in the past, who has got an audience together – and we’ve supported him in a few events – where he’s had van operators and truck operators, and operators of both vans and trucks in a room and his party piece is to the start the meeting by saying, okay, “put your hands up in the air if you run vans”. And all these hands go up in the air. “Stick your hand up in the air if you run trucks”, and, you know automatically people tend to take the van hand down. He says “no, no, please leave your van hand up, put your other hand up in the air if you’re running trucks”. So, you end up with a bunch of people in the room with both hands stuck up in the air. He’ll then ask the question of “those of you who are running vans and trucks – how many of you are doing it to different standards, different policies, and different procedures”. And every time I’ve seen him do this, the room will split into three groups. There’s those who do run their vans and their trucks to the same kind of standards and processes. There’ll be those who don’t run them to the same standards, and will admit it. And there’s always a very fascinating group of those who do run them to different standards but there’s no way they’re going to admit it. So those are the ones who are normally a little bit sweaty, and avoid giving eye contact. What he’ll then do is say “okay, those of you who are running them in different ways, why?”. And every time I’ve seen this happen, sooner or later, somebody will break cover and say “well, it’s because the law’s different” which I always think is quite a brave thing to say to a senior police officer that the law is different – which is exactly what he’s looking for, because the reality of it is, the law isn’t any different. There is law and regulations covering drivers’ hours in both vans and trucks, loading within vans and trucks, roadworthiness. Any issue that you want to look at, the law is pretty much the same – if not identical – in the van and truck space. But maybe it’s because people are confusing the law with operator licencing. Maybe it’s because they’re not seeing necessarily the level of enforcement at the side of a road. But, the bottom line is that the legislation is pretty much the same.

The other thing that, you know, again, we’re very keen to stress to operators of vans is – particularly if they’re running trucks as well – the traffic commissioners won’t look particularly kindly on a truck and a van operator that can’t operate their vans to the right standard. I’ve heard an ex-senior traffic commissioner say directly to an operator – a van operator – who was having some issues “look, if you can’t run your vans properly, I really don’t see why I should trust you with a fleet of trucks”. And you know, I think people do need to bear that in mind.

Simon: Yeah, and the fact that you’ve got an operator licence to run heavy goods vehicles – if you are found to be doing something wrong with vans, or even cars, it can go against your good reputation for running the heavies as well, can’t it?

Mark: Oh absolutely, and, you know, it is a risk to actually operating businesses; the way that their vans are being run around the place. And something that you just mentioned there we see quite regularly is that it’s a different department, it’s a different person – it’s not necessarily somebody with the right qualifications and the right kind of experiences running the van fleet. It tends to be, you know, a job that finds its way to wherever it finds its way to within an organisation. I think one of the things that we see in the van space quite regularly as well is what we used to call, smilingly, the ‘organically grown van fleet’. So it’s the local business, the local entrepreneur that set themselves up as a gardener, or dog walker, or window washer, or window cleaner – whatever it happens to be – and got good at it. And 5, 10 years down the line they look out the window and there’s 10, 20, 50 vans parked outside with a name written on the side of it in five-foot-high letters. But they haven’t gone through the same learning processes as a truck operator would do, and, you know, probably don’t realise that, one, they’re running a fairly sizable fleet with all the costs and everything that goes with that. But also, there’s a significant reputational risk in the health and safety risks of our business. I see that quite regularly, I’m afraid.

Simon: Yeah, and, and one of the things they’ve got to contend with now is that there’s a lot more interest from the enforcement authorities – the police and the DVSA – in doing these compliance stops where they’re checking. So a lot of those kinds of businesses where they haven’t had that learning and they don’t fully understand what’s required, and what their responsibilities entail… they can quickly find that their drivers are getting stopped on a regular basis and possibly even the business disrupted because, maybe, the vehicles aren’t allowed to continue for whatever reason. And I know, you’re involved in some of those – what’s your team doing to improve compliance? And how do you work with the enforcement agencies to raise standards? What do fleet operators need to know about those kinds of things?

Mark: We work with enforcement agencies in a number of ways really. One is in terms of trying to provide them with some of the expertise that they may need to be working in the commercial vehicle sector. They are very keen to not just prosecute and enforce people, but also to engage with operators – particularly in the van space, where an operator and the driver… it’s fairly clear that they may not actually know what’s expected of them. They’re not steaming in with prosecutions and fixed penalty notices – the aim is really all about improving the safety measures.

I guess the biggest high-profile thing that we do with enforcement agencies is Operation Tramline, which many of your listeners may have heard of. This is where we support the police by lending them one of our HGV cabs. It’s quite strange; the Daily Mail readers tend to recognise these as our ‘undercover super cabs’ – they’re not. They’re just white daf tractor units, they’re certainly not super cabs! They’ve got some minor adaptations in so much as the speed limiting is desirable, and they’ve got 360-degree cameras on them. But I wouldn’t exactly call them super cabs. But you know, they’re very useful. They provide an elevated camera platform for the police. They just help them identify what’s going on around them on the network. One of the misconceptions about Tramline that’s probably worth just clearing up a little bit is that they target other trucks – they don’t. They target anybody that’s demonstrating unsafe behaviours. Statistically about 40% or so of the stops do involve other HGVs, and there’s no getting around the fact that the elevated platform does give the police an opportunity to view across into the HGV cabs. And we see some poor behaviours – things that you really wouldn’t expect a professional driver to be doing. But another 30% are in the vans, and we can see it clearly provides a good vantage point into vans and we can see what’s going in there. But also the cars – so the split is 40% trucks, about 30% cars and 30% vans. And again, the kind of offences that are identified, again, sadly, were rather mundane. Still dangerous, but the kind of things I guess you’d expect us to be identifying, which is distraction – primarily use of mobile phones, not being in full control of the vehicle, people eating their lunch, etcetera, etcetera, putting makeup on. But we also find an awful lot of non-seatbelt wearing – which, again, baffles me to be honest. Why people wouldn’t wear a seatbelt? So it’s a very powerful piece, but it gives us the opportunity to engage with the drivers and, frankly, most of the time – a good 60% of the time – it’s words of advice and off you go, driver, learn your lesson from it. And all fleet operators need to know about this is we’re there to help and support to be brutally honest. We have had a number of situations now where we’ve provided direct feedback to operators about what we’ve discovered with their drivers on network – whether it be through Operation Tramline or other activity that we’re involved in. By and large, I have to say, they take it very well and actually get involved in sorting the issue out across the fleet.

Simon: Yeah, I’ve seen quite a bit of the footage that has come out of Op Tramline. My favourite, I think, was a truck driver who was eating a full three course meal, like a Sunday roast dinner on his knee with a plate and a knife and fork and all sorts of stuff. But the sort of footage that you get of the van drivers, and indeed car drivers, company car drivers… there is a huge amount where they’re playing or fiddling around with the phone, checking messages and they think because they’re kind of doing it in on their lap, almost, that the car next to them can’t see and they don’t think about the truck next to them that’s filming them doing it.

Mark: It’s so easy to focus on some of the comedy moments, I get that. And yeah, the three-course meal was quite impressive from a food hygiene and table manners point of view, not so good from a road safety point of view. But the reality of it is that the great majority of stuff is, you know, nowhere near as exciting as that, but still immensely dangerous. And, you know, the mobile phone thing amazes me that people think by putting a mobile phone on their knee, nobody’s going to notice – their head’s nodding up and down while they’re trying to answer text messages. It’s just such a dangerous thing to be doing.

Simon: Yeah. I wanted to cover a couple of projects that you and I have been working on specifically to target a couple of challenges that a lot of van fleet managers have. And one of them was around driver wellbeing, for instance. So we worked on a project last year which we launched in November with CALM – the mental health charity, or anti-suicide charity, Campaign Against Living Miserably. That was geared at trying to provide some level of support for van drivers who quite often find themselves effectively being a lone worker don’t they? Why is mental health such a big challenge within the van driving community?

Mark: That the whole project started with the realisation that that horrible statistic that I think most of us are aware of now, which is that suicide is the biggest killer of men under the age of 45 – it was such a close match with the demographic of van drivers and to a slightly lesser extent, truck drivers – feedback from operators tells us, you know, a good 99% of their drivers, are male, and in the van space a good 75% of those are male. So there’s such a tight fit with that demographic. But when we started exploring this with the guys at CALM, who – I have to say – have been brilliant with this, is that there are all kinds of other issues flowing in there as well. You know, by and large they’re lone workers, they were working in pressured industries with time constraints, they’re dealing with the pressures of the road and all the rest of it… they may be in the kinds of socio-economic classes that might be a little bit more prone to these kind of issues. And indeed, we stumbled across, during that process, a report from the ONS, the Office for National Statistics, which confirmed to us that commercial vehicle drivers, van drivers in particular, are some 20% more likely to take their life than their equivalent non-commercial vehicle drivers. And all we’re trying to do with the CALM driver initiative is just start the conversation. Our CALM driver initiative is just about trying to provide some resources for operators to provide a couple of stickers, a little leaflet, a web page which the guys can go and look at, signposting the crisis lines that CALM – and indeed other mental health charities – have available to us. It’s just trying to start the conversation in a demographic where, you know, there clearly are concerns to be addressed.

Simon: And those CALM driver packs are free to access – we’ve produced tens of thousands of them now, haven’t we, which we’re sharing out, so they’re free to access. You can register for those on the Driving for Better Business website, and I’ll put details of those in the show notes as well so people can go and download those. The other resource that we’ve been working on that’s almost due for launch now – we’re just finalising it – is the Van Driver Toolkit. So, what was the thinking behind that, Mark?

Mark: Okay, just to put people’s minds at rest, it’s not a bag of spanners that we’re trying to provide out to van drivers. But it’s really trying to address something we talked about a little bit earlier in the podcast which is that in the truck world, the operators know what’s expected of them, the drivers know what’s expected of them. In the van world, maybe not quite so much to be truthful… it’s trying to take away that “sorry, I didn’t know” excuse for poor behaviours. I guess that’s probably one of the major drivers behind the initiative. So, the Van Driver Toolkit consists of 35 topics and online modules. I think the best way of thinking of them is a double-sided piece of A5, although clearly these things will be available digitally for drivers and operators to access as well. But for each of those 35 topics, we’ve tried to come up with something that’s pretty punchy, pretty direct, pretty easy for drivers and operators to interpret. And fundamentally for each of the issues, is ‘this is why it’s important’. ‘This is what happens if you get it wrong, this is what happens if you get it right and this is what we’re expecting you to do’. And the topics are exactly what you’d expect them to be. You know, it’s talking about driver fatigue, it’s talking about driver distraction, it’s talking about changing weather conditions, vehicle overloading, speed limits on vehicles, etcetera, etcetera. And the trick with them, as far as I can see, is to make them easily digestible, which I hope that they are. And also to make sure that they’re easily and freely available – and again, you know, we’re going to put these out into the various van operating industries. They’re all there for people to see, they’re all there for people to use – whether it’s via linking to our website, whether it’s embedding them in their various intranets and their various driver apps and all the rest of it. It’s just there to provide support to the industry and try to become a… if you like a trusted voice within the van operating industries. You know, we haven’t got an axe to grind from the enforcement point of view, we just want to make life safer on our network.

Simon: Yeah, and I think both the CALM Driver and the Van Driver Toolkit are really excellent resources. I’m proud to be part of those and I think that most fleet operators will find those incredibly useful, so we’ll put links to both of those in the show notes.

Mark: I think something is probably worth saying… this is probably worth mentioning that both of those initiatives have been designed with input from the industry, you know, we haven’t locked ourselves away in the Highways England padded cell to come up with these ideas. We’ve been talking to operators right the way through the development, and taking a lot of views and thoughts. And if you take the Van Driver Toolkit in particular, you know, the sort of businesses that we’ve had trialling and providing support… they really like these. They’re gagging for us to release them. So, you know, for the listeners, please take that as an endorsement and a recommendation to why it is probably worth having a look at these.

Simon: Yeah, absolutely. They’re really well written. And the last thing I want to talk to you about, Mark, is a project that you were working on last year with Thatcham Research and Euro NCAP, which is the Van Safety Rating. So, I guess over the last five years, really, it’s become pretty common now for most passenger cars and company cars to have quite a high level of driver assistance technology, and specifically emergency braking systems. If you want a five-star Euro NCAP car now, it has to be fitted with that kind of technology. But vans have traditionally lagged quite a way behind that, and certainly until recently, hardly any vans at all had this technology on. But this new Euro NCAP Van Safety Rating is meant to help fleet operators identify some of the safer vans that have got collision avoidance technology on them. Can you tell us a little about that project and what you’re hoping to achieve with that?

Mark: Yeah, it’s been a really interesting project to be honest, and it’s ongoing but it’s really trying to learn from the experiences within the car sectors with that increased safety equipment I mean you’ve alluded to it now, Simon – it’s actually pretty difficult now to buy a car that hasn’t got, you know, a whole world of safety systems built into it, regardless of the size and the cost and the standard of a car, now. So, the kind of inbuilt safety equipment from airbags through to emergency braking through to lane departures is just almost taken for granted in the car space. But it’s really apparent when you compare that across to the van fleets – an awful lot of that equipment is either not available, or if it is available, it’s actually really difficult to source in a particular model with a particular kind of configuration and all the rest of it. And I guess the catalyst for the arms race, almost, that has developed in the car space was the introduction of the NCAP ratings on cars all those years ago, and Renault Laguna suddenly, you know, taking the lead in being the safest car in the world. And that’s exactly what we want to replicate in the van space, and it really is an eye opener when you start digging into it and you realise that it’s virtually impossible to buy a van with anywhere near comparable safety equipment built into it as it is on even a fairly standard family saloon car. And that’s an environment that the driver, and anybody else involved in that particular job, is going to be spending way longer in probably than they would in their own passenger car. And even when the kit is fitted, very often it’s two or three models behind what is currently being fitted to that same manufacturers’ car fleet. And, you know, the whole project is really designed to try and light a blue touch paper under this important topic and actually make vans technically engineered, as safely as the comparable cars. So, it’s got a way to go yet, but it’s showing good progress. And it’s really interesting and genuinely a very important, important development.

Simon: Yeah, and I know Thatcham did some research with Euro NCAP a few years back now, when cars were passing this threshold and proved quite conclusively that cars with this kind of technology were involved in significantly less rear end collisions and they were significantly less likely to be hit with third party insurance claims. And the business benefits of having cars with this technology… they were really significant weren’t they. And so I think what we’re looking for here really is for fleets to realise that same equation works with vans and to start demanding that technology from the van manufacturers – so that the manufacturers will start putting in the latest technology. Because they’ve already got that technology – it’s on the cars – they just need to fit it to the vans as well. And then really, we’re really only going to get traction with this if fleet operators start demanding that from the manufacturers.

Mark: Yeah, and that’s the other side of the equation, Simon – making it clear to specifiers whether they buying directly or via a leaser and all the rest of it that this equipment ought to be on the vehicles and putting some pressure on the manufacturers to step up to the plate with it. Because, as you say, it’s not as if they’ve got to go and invent it. The kit is already there, they just need to fit it and implement it in the van space. And there’s a lot of stuff that van manufacturers could be doing in this space. It’s a particular bug bear of mine that vans, for example, aren’t automatically speed limited to 70 miles an hour. At the end of the day, a van is a commercial tool. What other tool could you buy that would allow you to break the law in a commercial setting? You know, you couldn’t go out and buy a brake press and ask for the guards to be removed so you could go a bit faster. I genuinely don’t understand why the vehicles aren’t made and marketed and sold as being the commercial tool they happen to be. So yeah, there’s a lot to be done there. It will hopefully reduce the level of incidents, as you’ve said Simon, but the other important thing is it will reduce incident severity and make it more survivable.

Simon: Mark, thank you very much. It’s been a really illuminating conversation. I really appreciate you sharing your insights with us today – it’s been fascinating. Thank you very much.

Mark: Absolute pleasure Simon.