Driving Change –It’s Personal

Mark Cartwright, head of Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention at National Highways, tells safety conference delegates why, this time, it’s personal.

Road safety statistics omit one crucial factor about collisions on the strategic road network, says Head of Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention at National Highways, Mark Cartwright. And that’s the fact that every statistic, every death and every casualty was a person. Every death and every life changing injury leaves a grieving family struggling to cope with a new, awful reality.

It is, Mark says, always personal. “They are not statistics. They are your brother, your sister, your aunt, your uncle, your neighbour or your mate. And we can do something to protect them.”

That is why he is exhorting fleets across the UK to incorporate road risk into their health and safety briefs, and to extend their influence in road safety vertically and horizontally through their supply chains.

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“We have ambitious targets for casualty reduction on the strategic road network,” says Mark. “We have a goal of zero harm. And we all have a role to play in that.

“We cannot achieve our targets alone,” he said. “We could do what we do 100 times over and we could not make the change that is needed alone.”

He explained to delegates that this inaugural safety event, hosted by National Highways in conjunction with Driving for Better Business, was not intended to be the “standard safety conference we’ve all been to before”.

Rather, he said, it is a call to action. “This is about #DrivingChange. Let’s be clear: Vehicles don’t crash. People crash. We need to change that.

“Another word for the 20 million vehicle drivers which use the strategic road network for work – employees. And employees should be trained, managed, and protected.”

The power of procurement

Mark’s call to action for fleets is twofold:

To apply the same rigorous health and safety approach to activity on the road as organisations apply to their premises

To use their influence to persuade, encourage, inspire and mandate road risk management throughout their supply chain.

“Many of those here today run excellent truck and van fleets. But do you require the same of your supply chains? You would not use a contractor who didn’t comply with health and safety requirements on site – so why do we not expect our contractors to have robust health and safety when on the road?”

Mark says that with half a million trucks, almost five million vans, one million company cars and up to 14m grey fleet using UK roads, 50% of the total UK vehicle parc is used for work. “That’s 20 million vehicles which can be affected by our health and safety decisions. That’s half the vehicles in the UK – the scale of opportunity for positive change is huge.”

Not just a fleet issue

Mark called on all the fleet professionals present to go back to their organisations and talk to their health and safety, and procurement, counterparts. “Explore who and how they can influence employees and your supply chains. Explain to them that their duty of care under health and safety legislation extends to the road.”

Here to help

National Highways has expertise and extensive resources to help fleets improve their safety performance. Mark spoke about the Wheelwright Tyre Check system which his unit lends for free to fleets to check tyre compliance at entry and exit points.

“We checked 300 vehicles today and found 16 illegal tyres, including one case of dangerous underinflation,” said Mark. “If that’s from a room of fleet professionals, can you imagine the issues with the vehicle parc at large?”

NH also runs Project Ping in which it repurposes the data from the cameras and sensors on the SRN in order to give fleets an insight into specific driver behaviours, such as close following, ignoring the seat belt or mobile phone use.

“We take the view that if we tell fleets what we find, they can fix it, and that’s to everyone’s benefit,” says Mark. “If fleets would like to be involved with Project Ping, they can contact me. We input their registration numbers into the system and then feed the data back to them.”

Driving for Better Business also has two award-winning resource packs. One is CALM Driver, the Campaign Against Living Miserably, which addresses driver mental health.

“Did you know a male CV driver is 20% more likely to take his own life than someone his age in another demographic?” asks Mark.

Finally the Van Driver Toolkit, with 37 topics covered and a new range of toolbox talk videos is available for fleets to download and use for free.