Good Road Safety Advice or Just A Cynical Piece of PR?

You know when you’ve told your kids to take care as they walk to school on dark winter mornings so often that you almost feel like you’re wasting your time? Well, at E-Training World we’re beginning to feel that way about Safe Driving messages in the fleet sector during the festive period.

Because when you look at the advice that flies around the fleet sector at this time of year, many of it doesn’t really come from people that are passionate about road safety or are qualified to give it. Its often just PR agencies turning to their contract hire company or fleet sector supplier and saying “Hey guys. Lets do a safe driving at Christmas story and get some coverage in Fleet News”.

You then read the usal stuff. The importance of Winter Checks – oh, yes. I can see fleet managers right now thinking – wow, what a cracking idea to check that our vehicles are safe for winter driving. And what’s this? A fee guide regarding safe driving in poor conditions. I must make a note to consider whether my journey is important before I set off in snow, ice or fog.

Of course, I could go on and on. But the point I’m making is that because its become an excuse for many companies to jump on the bandwagon through cynical PR, the actual message from road safety professionals and the respected fleet driver training companies is being lost. As I said in my opening line, its like the parent who’s words fall on deaf ears.

As a champion of road safety, I shall personally never give up trying to advise the fleet sector about how it can make everyone’s lives safer. Because for all the articles that appear about vehicle checks, so many are still not done. And for all those guides advising drivers not to venture out to an appointment when conditions are treachourous, we still end up with motorway pile ups in adverse weather.

All I ask is for those who have no direct involvement in road safety, who cynically dish out generic advice to cynically promote themselves, to let the professionals do the talking. Because otherwise, pertinent life saving advice from qualified people will be missed amongst the pile of PR from those who haven’t got a clue.

Fleet drivers face serious back problems

I read with interest the article “Fleet drivers face serious back problems” (Fleet News 3 Dec 2009) however there was one item that your article did not touch on. The growing inclination within our litigious society for drivers to sue employers for their injuries.

 The very same drivers who are off work with back problems are also the same people targeted by daytime TV adverts from No Win-No Fee firms. The temptation of drivers to make a claim is a serious threat to businesses who could end up paying compensation and having their reputation damaged by the whole process.

I continue to feel we are mollycoddling drivers far too much these days. Does the employer really have to give advice on (and I quote from your article) ‘offering models suited to the tasks of drivers, with appropriate levels of seat adjustability to ensure good postures to be adopted at all times’? Quite frankly I find this laughable.

Will we reach a point where the company has to ask the driver if they can reach the pedals OK? Or are they stretching too far to use the gearstick safely and without shoulder pain? And is there a possibility that they could get their hand trapped in the door? Where is the driver’s responsibility in all of this?

We are, regrettably, in an era where employees are deemed completely faultless and the employer is always to blame. It’s for this reason that on our online profiling system we ask the driver to confirm that they haven’t suffered any back problems when driving. By recording that the driver is ‘injury free’ at least gives the employer a dated audit trail that can be used if someone suddenly feels inspired to make a claim.

Shell safety initiative, a distraction?

Shell the oil company, want carmakers to disable sat-nav screens whilst the vehicle is moving, leaving just the voice instructions.  Is this a good safety initiative or are they taking safety too far? You could argue that anything that involves the driver taking his eyes off the road even for a second is a distraction and therefore on safety grounds should be eliminated.  After all, a crash could happen in a split second! People involved in crashes say “it happened suddenly” or “he came out of nowhere” so crashes must happen in a split second?   Well, actually crashes don’t happen in a split second, they take time to develop. The reason drivers use statements like “suddenly” is because they weren’t observing the road scene properly or simply was not concentrating on their driving. I applaud Shell for taking road safety seriously, but I do think that disabling sat-navs will not make much, if any difference to driver safety. If a driver is going to be distracted by a quick glance at a sat-nav screen, then surely he will also be distracted by his speedometer, temperature gauge, fuel gauge etc. A driver is mostly likely to crash because he is mentally distracted and yet we don’t see any company doing anything to reduce that risk. In fact most companies are adding to that risk by expecting their staff to reach higher targets and generally be more productive. For example I have heard many business men and women say they use the time driving as thinking time, or worse still time to catch up on phone calls. I recommend that all companies take the safety of their drivers as seriously as Shell do, but keep it practical. Don’t stop everything on health & safety grounds, driving is a risky business. You can do a lot to reduce that risk, but you can never make it risk free!

Is it us, the driver training industry, or fleet managers who have been getting it wrong for over 20 years

Is it us, the driver training industry, or fleet managers who have been getting it wrong for over 20 years – or perhaps are we both failing to convince Company Directors?

I have been in the driver training industry for the last 2 decades and in that time our industry has marketed fleet driver training firstly as improving driver safety, in the early years through skill development and then in the mid to late 1990’s through development of correct attitudes. During recent years some companies within the industry have used the “fear factor” to gain business. And now we’ve added green benefits, and at last company drivers actually want the training or so we’re led to believe from a Lex Autolease survey.

So company drivers are happy to have training if it will save them money (even company drivers have to pay for fuel used on private mileage) but not to reduce crashes. What does this tell us? Well we have been reasonably successful in changing attitudes towards drink driving and we may now reduce speeding, not through the explosion of speed cameras, but because drivers will save money on their fuel bill. But most drivers think they are good safe drivers and no amount of training will benefit them. So the world is full of good safe drivers – of course it isn’t. We all know that.

But why do we all think we are good safe drivers and don’t need further training? I believe it is because we can all recognise a bad driver; he is the one that cut us up on the way to work this morning. But what is a good driver? He is the driver we didn’t notice this morning, because he was always at the correct speed and positioned well for the hazard, bend or junction. Most driver trainers will tell you 5% of drivers are very good and about 5% are very bad, that means for 95% of us could do with further driver development.

Back to my original question: Is it us the industry or the fleet managers that are getting it wrong in persuading directors to part with money? The answer is all of us! We the industry need to stress all the benefits of driver training to our potential clients, these include reduced cost, insurance, less down time, reduced sick leave, fuel and maintenance etc etc. Fleet managers must sell the benefits to both directors and staff, which doesn’t always happen. Why pay for risk assessments and training if you then tell your staff, you must only do it so we can tick a box.

Fleet Operators Can Save Lives and Money This Winter

I woke up this morning to our first frost of the winter. And I shuddered. Not because I was cold, but because as someone who is passionate about road safety I thought of all the accidents, injuries and deaths that occur on our roads during the winter months.

Although most company vehicle drivers are aware that roadside call outs increase during the winter months, that bodyshops become busier repairing damaged vehicles and that driving becomes treachourous in wintery weather - caused by anything from ice on the road to smeered windscreens and impaired vision - those same drivers are also racing around, driving too close and not respecting the change in conditions.

At some point this winter its almost inevitable that we’ll turn our televisions on to reports of a major pile up in fog. If we know its going to happen why don’t we temper our driving accordingly and slow down, stay back and take our time?

OK – I’ve just read what I’ve written so far and I’m beginning to sound like a bit of a nagging Aunty! But if you are a fleet manager reading this, please do me a favour. Put an email together to your drivers about the dangers of driving in the winter, remind them of the increase in accidents, and tell them to take greater care.

Then send a second email to their managers advising them of their duty to promote safe driving so that a cultural shift is achieved. Think of it like this. If I challenged you to drive 50 miles in icy conditions, and if you didn’t have an accident I gave you £5,000 how would you drive? I bet you wouldn’t sit on anyone’s bumper. I bet you would be more cautious. And I bet you would focus more on looking for hazards rather than digging out your favourite CD or making a few hands free calls.

Now think about the cost of accident – repairing bent metal, replacement vehicle, driver downtime, insurance excess, management time etc etc – hang on, I’ve just done some numbers and a small accident comes to approx £5000. So its not just safety, its cost too.

If you’re a canny fleet manager I’d suggest you could launch a safe driving competition and offer the winner £1000 and you’ll more than save that amount in reduced accident costs. And then you’ve not only improved safety you’ve saved money too. Isn’t that called a Win Win?

Let me know if you’d like to set one up as we’ve run many safe driving competitions and they really work. Email me at graham@e-trainingworld.com

LABOUR deputy leader Harriet Harman is facing prosecution over claims she crashed her car while chatting on a mobile

Did anyone spot this in The sun newspaper on Friday 20/11/09?

The CPS has said: “We have decided there is sufficient evidence and it is in the public interest to prosecute the MP for driving without due care and attention and driving whilst using a hand-held mobile telephone.” Ms Harman, the former Solicitor General and a qualified lawyer, will be charged with Careless driving which carries a maximum £5,000 fine plus up to nine penalty points and using a mobile while driving which can lead to a £1,000 fine plus three penalty points.

However, interestingly this was not front page news and for many people this may be the first they have heard of it. Had someone been injured or killed in the crash, then it would have been a totally different news item – certainly front page news.

So I guess she was lucky! I say lucky because it seems to me that when it comes to driving it’s not what we do, but the outcome that decides the punishment determined by the courts. Had Ms Harman killed someone she would have been facing a prison sentence. Whatever Ms Harman ends up being charged with, the question is will it change her driving?

The answer is probably not. Particularly when you appreciate that Ms Harman was banned from driving for seven days and fined £400 after speeding at 99mph on the M4 near Swindon, Wilts, in 2003. Four years later, she was fined £60 and given three penalty points for exceeding a temporary speed limit.

We all know people who have points on their licence for say two or more speeding offences, but why haven’t they changed their behaviour and reduced their speed? The answer is because they don’t see that they have done something that potentially could kill someone. They see it as being unlucky in getting caught. I believe the government that Ms Harman represents should review how we deal with motorists that break the rules because punishment doesn’t work – education does.

To read the article see http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2738298/Labours-deputy-Harriet-Harman-to-face-car-crash-phone-charge.html

 

Are we starting to use the recession as an excuse?

Sorry for being controversial, but it strikes me that many companies are citing the recession as being the reason for a great deal of procrastination when it comes to Duty of Care and Managing Occupational Road Risk.  We’ve met so many fleet operators this year who call us into meetings to help them look at ways of saving money and taking the safety of their employees seriously by implementing driver risk assessment and driver training plans, to be told afterwards that it cannot move forwards due to lack of funds.

This is in a market which, when surveyed by Fleet News tells us that the majority of fleet managers see driver training and fleet risk management as their key priority, so we have a real gap here between intention and action.

So lets do the maths to understand why the recession is stopping progress when it comes to fleet driver safety.

A 100 car fleet can risk assess its drivers online for £1500. It can train its medium risk drivers for £30 per head (lets say equating to a bill of £2100) with on road training  for high risk drivers coming to around £1500. That all adds up to £5100 total to get the job done, meet health and safety requirements and save money through less accidents, improved fuel usage, less maintenance costs etc. When you consider that a typical car will be costing (lets say) £5000 per annum to operate before we even look at fuel and insurance we’re talking about an annual cost for that 100 car fleets of half a million quid.

All of which is being spent by the same fleets that cannot afford the £5100 due to the recession.  If you ask me, company directors are still paying lip service to the issue of health and safety when it comes to their vehicle fleet and I wonder what they’ll be spending on their Christmas parties and corporate gifts?

If its more than £50 per head for their drivers we’ll know where priorities really lie.

Child road safety – Is it really on the Government Agenda?

Child road safety – we put so many resources in making sure our children are safe on the roads and rightly so. But it is drivers and riders that knock down our children and what is the government doing about it?

They spend money on adverts (shown late at night) to encourage children to wear reflective bands etc. They reduce the speed outside schools to 20mph. Have you tried driving at a speed anywhere near 20mph when there are parked cars everywhere? My point is like most things to do with road safety, the government pay lip service to it.

Speed cameras cost £40,000 each and over the last 12 years we have seen these multiply like rabbits, is this because they generate revenue? Where as we have seen a decline in other road safety measures including; traffic police, school crossing patrols, road side maintenance such as cutting back overgrown hedges that cover signs etc etc.

I have attended many conferences and meetings over the 20 years that I have been involved in road safety and listened to many speakers passionate about improving road safety. The government will argue that they are successful in this area and the statistics do confirm it. We have reduced the number of people killed on our roads, but is that due to better drivers or one or more of the following; improved medical factors, i.e. paramedics are much better trained now a days, more safety features in vehicles and improvements in road design.

Why can the government invest in road safety that will show a monetary return, but seemingly not in driver training. I believe that’s because the return driver training provides is difficult to measure e.g. a fatal crash will cost the UK tax payer over £1 million, but how would you know if a driver avoided a crash because he had training or he would have avoided the crash anyway?

The answer is simple, you can’t do it on an individual basis but as a country, region or even a company will have statistics and if after training their crash rate (both fatal and non fatal) has reduced then you have got a return on your investment.

The trouble is when it comes to government departments they all have their own budgets and money spent by one department will provide saving in another e.g. driver training paid for by the Dept of Transport would provide savings in the NHS.

FREE Online Drink Driving Awareness Programme

At E-Training World, we’re passionate about road safety, which is why we’ve decided to do our bit to help  those who, like us, want to raise awareness about the dangers of drinking and driving. But the problem doesn’t just lie with the law breakers and reckless idiots who blatantly drink and then drive their cars.

 

We also have the problem of those who drink at night and do not realise they are still over the limit the morning after.

 

Its something I’ve written about before in a previous blog but I decided it was time to apply the skills we have as a business to try and do more to stop it happening.

 

Because E-Training World specialises in online driver risk assessments and e-driver training, we’ve built a free online programme to highlight the dangers of drinking and driving.

 

www.drinkdrivingkills.com is being offered to any organisation, business or individual completely free of charge as part of E-Training World’s commitment to road safety.

 

We’re calling on any individual or organisation to help us highlight the dangers and risks associated with drinking and driving. And to achieve this we decided to offer this online programme free of charge and we’d like to encourage any company, road safety organisation, public sector body or anyone keen to promote safe driving to put a link to www.drinkdrivingkills.com from their web site.

 

This will not only promote safe driving more widely by giving simple access to a system that highlights the dangers of drinking and driving, it also acts as a badge of approval on any web site that drink driving is not acceptable.

 

The system allows you to pour alcohol into a glass to see if you know what a unit looks like, as well as testing your braking reactions. Why not have a go yourself, place a link to it from your own web site and join our campaign.

 

Please let me know what you think to graham@e-trainingworld.com as I’m always pleased to receive feedback.

 

Lack of Common Sense Costing Fleet Industry Dear

In the UK a ‘farcical health and safety culture’ is emerging which, if allowed to continue, will have an increasingly detrimental effect on businesses operating fleets of vehicles.

 

E-Training World is an online driver risk assessment and e-driver training specialist, and I believe it is high time more business leaders spoke out in favour of common sense when it comes to health and safety related issues, as we head towards an increasingly litigious and mollycoddled society which will cost fleet operators dear.

 

Every week I hear the concerns of many company directors worried by the ever-rising threat of potential prosecution.

 

In nearly all cases, these are reputable businesses that would never knowingly put any of their employees or other road users at risk. They feel, like I do, that the law is weighing too heavily in favour of employees with very little protection for employers.

 

When you consider a non-company car driver, you are looking at someone with their own car, using it for their own private journeys. It is their responsibility to insure their vehicle adequately, it is their responsibility to make sure the vehicle is roadworthy, that it is taxed correctly, that they have had eyesight tests, that their driving licence is valid, and to ensure they do not drink and drive, use their mobile phone etc. If they do not do these things, they know that if they cause an accident or are pulled over by the police they only have themselves to blame and that they will be personally accountable.

 

However, the moment they are on company business responsibility shifts to the employer and we’ve reached that ridiculous stage whereby businesses are having to document the obvious, such as ‘don’t drink and drive on company business’ and ‘make sure you are sitting with your seat adjusted correctly’, in fear of repercussions if a driver has an accident whilst at work or makes a claim.

 

Many will agree that this is not fuelled by a genuine desire to improve safety at work. What is fuelling this requirement is the safety compliance market which is one of the fastest growing in the UK. As a result of its growing economic importance the purpose of health and safety now has extremely strong financial implications and I believe this is quickly outweighing its actual purpose of creating a safer world for us all to live and work in.

 

The best example is the UK’s rising compensation culture, fuelled by the no win no fee legal firms who encourage employees to take action against their employers. This creates the vicious circle of companies having no option but to turn to the health and safety experts for more and more protection which has nothing to do with common sense safety at all and is mainly driven by money and the threat of prosecution.

 

Enjoying the tax income is the Government which benefits from this increasingly important sector of the UK economy, from a revenue perspective, and has little incentive to encourage more rational behaviour.

 

It’s high time that the fleet sector campaigned for a more sensible approach to road safety which ensures that safe working practices are a requirement but whereby common sense prevails. Helping companies deliver improved safety and achieve legal compliance in a practical, cost-effective way is extremely important to E-Training World and adopting a grounded, business-like approach as well as improving safety is something that I personally feel extremely passionate about.

 

Because if we allow the health and safety sector to continue as it is, I can see many fleet operators quickly reaching a stage whereby they simply allocate budget for the avoidance of prosecution, rather than spending pro-actively on meaningful and essential safety initiatives, which completely defeats the object of what we are all trying to achieve.