A podcast for those who manage drivers and their vehicles, and want to reduce work-related road risk in their organisation. Resources to help ensure your Driving for Work Policy is up to date and follows best practice.
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Show notes: Louise Clarkson, National Highways Customer Services
For this episode, I’m handing the reins over to my colleague, Anne-Marie Penny of National Highways and the Driving for Better Business Programme Manager. She’s talking to Louise Clarkson, who is Operational Assurance and Capability Business Services Team Leader for National Highways’ Customer Services Division.
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.
Are your drivers mentally ready to control a vehicle?
Episode 31
Sunday, February 25, 2024 • Duration 26:42
Simon: Hello everyone and welcome to Let’s Talk Fleet Risk. My guest today is James Tillyer, Managing Consultant at Transformotion, based in Ireland, who are specialists in immersive driver training.
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.
Careless & dangerous driving - what does a prosecution look like for employers?
Episode 22
Thursday, April 20, 2023 • Duration 21:48
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 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.
My guest this week is someone whom many of you may have seen
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.
Driver Fitness – What If Your Drivers’ Jobs Were Good for Them?
Episode 19
Tuesday, February 14, 2023 • Duration 33:27
Show notes: Driver Fitness – What If Your Drivers’ Jobs Were Good for Them?
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 it’s staff. Especially those who also drive the company vehicles.
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.
How Do You Know Who is Drug Driving in your Organisation?
Episode 18
Wednesday, January 18, 2023 • Duration 26:48
Show notes: How Do You Know Who is Drug Driving in your Organisation?
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.
Ean Lewin, DTec International and Lesley O’Brien, Freightlink Europe
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.
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:
Tyre Safety - 35,000 tyre incidents a year, the tip of the iceberg
Episode 15
Tuesday, October 4, 2022 • Duration 34:11
Show notes: Tyre Safety - 35,000 tyre incidents a year, the tip of the iceberg
Stuart Lovatt, Chairman, TyreSafe
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.
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.
RSSB & DfBB - Collaboration to improve road risk management
Episode 14
Tuesday, September 20, 2022 • Duration 20:03
Show notes: Tavid Dobson, RSSB
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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(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 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.
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(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.
PDF - The Hidden Cost of Substance Abuse in the Workplace
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PDF - Lose your FLT licence, Lose your livelihood
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PDF - Effects of Stimulants on the Body
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PDF - Effects of Depressants on the Body
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PDF - Effects of Alcohol on the Male Body
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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
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(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.
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.
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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.
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’
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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