Leasedrive Velo Blog

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

It seems as if we are seeing the first cracks starting to appear on the motoring safety front as Government and organisational cuts start to take hold. This has significant bearing on fleet operators.

On Tuesday of this week, it was reported that incidents of speeding had increased by 88% in Oxfordshire following the County Council’s decision to switch off all speed cameras to save money.

According to the Thames Valley Safer Road Partnership, which monitored drivers on two roads over a period of five days, 62 drivers were clocked speeding on the Watlington Road, Cowley, up 88% while on the A44 in Woodstock, 110 drivers exceeded the 30 mph speed limit, 18% more than the average for 2010.

The Council will save £600,000 per annum following the switch-off at the end of July. As we know, fines generated by speed cameras disappear into central Government’s coffers, never to be seen again, rather than directly fed back into road safety programmes or for local council transport budgets. Brake, the road safety charity, is deeply concerned but the Council states it’s too early to draw conclusions.

Inevitably, speeding will creep up where speed cameras are switched off, with consequent repercussions for road safety.

Meanwhile, the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSPA) has declared concern over the number of vans failing safety checks. Last year, it carried out 21,000 roadside safety checks with more than half of vans found to have mechanical defects of one sort or another, the most common problem being brake related.

The van sector is a good barometer of the state of health of the economy and short-cuts in maintenance are a sure sign that things are beginning to really bite.

Apparently, according to VOSPA, 45 per cent of vans fail their MOT indicating poor maintenance during their working life. It also seems that according to unpublished data, VOSPA has found a disturbing upward trend of MOT failures among vans.

Given that the VOSPA roadside check failure rates for HGVs and PSVs are much lower at 34 and 24 per cent respectively, vans are posing the greatest threat to road safety on our roads.

VOSPA is keen for van operators to adopt the good practice of HGV operators as outlined in the ‘O’ licence on preventative maintenance by, among other things, making van drivers conduct a daily check of the roadworthiness of their vehicle before starting deliveries and keeping proper records of those checks.

VOSPA has also noted a deteriorating trend in MOT failures for cars and light vans, rising from 33 per cent in 2006/07 to 36 per cent in 2008/09. These principally relate to brakes, lights, suspension and tyres.

Inevitably, as the cost saving squeeze gets tighter, the temptation to cut corners on proper vehicle maintenance will increase. The recession has certainly seen operators and drivers ignore what is basic safety and the trend will only get worse especially as vehicle service intervals lengthen and owners ignore the recommended service intervals.

Given the backdrop of duty of care, organisations need to take a sharp look at current practices as penny-pinching on servicing could prove a false economy. And now that the European Commission has ruled servicing by authorised dealers is not a pre-requisite to vehicle warranty maintenance, fleets can save money by going to non-franchised servicing outlets. All in all, there is no excuse for proper maintenance.

It seems we are all being fattened up for the big chop. Talk of 25% cuts in government budgets on public spending have given way to news that departments are also being asked to prepare budgets for a second potential scenario, that of 40% cuts in government spending. Health and international aid are the only ring-fenced departments not due to suffer cuts and the likes of defence and education are due to be protected as far as possible. Guess which department will really be for the chop? Yes, Transport surprise, surprise. Apparently, road repairs are the only costs that are likely to remain unaffected but we’ll have to see about that.

Already comes news that £17.2 million will be cut from the road safety budget. This follows latest government statistics showing the number of deaths on Britain’s roads fell by 12% last year to a record low of 2222 in 2009, while child deaths fell from 124 to 81. Total casualties, including slight injuries, were 4% down. It is troubling to think that complacency may be creeping in on road safety at a time when the trend for fatalities is consistently downward.

Naturally, various organisations are up in arms over the news, led by road safety charity, Brake. However, as with other areas of government spending, Whitehall is looking at avoiding the prevalent duplication of activities by various departments and organisations. Such an approach would make natural sense but not at the expense of road safety.

The potential consequences of the deep cut in road safety budgets should cause considerable concern among fleet managers. As we all know, the benefits of proper risk management, including road safety, far outweigh the costs.

It’s not as if that, while road deaths are on the decline, our roads are the safest. Indeed, the UK is ranked only the fourth safest in Europe for its road network. The European Road Assessment Programme (EuroRAP), which rates the safety risk of roads in Europe, considers just 53% of the UK’s roads to be ‘low risk’.

The EuroRAP score assesses roads on how well their design protects users from death or disabling injury in the event of an accident with the safest awarded four stars.

In the UK, half of the motorways under the Highways Agency’s control achieved a four-star rating while 78% of dual carriageways were given a three-star rating. EuroRAP considers the protection offered if a vehicle runs off the road, the risk of a head-on collision and the safety of junctions.

Half of motorways do not protect users if they run off the road while for dual carriageways the figure is a high 90%. Ninety-seven per cent however do offer protection against head-on collisions. Single carriageways lacked the most safety features, 62% rated two stars.

According to EuroRAP our road safety network is just not consistent enough. For example, Scottish roads are twice as risky as roads in England and Wales and the safest country, Sweden, has managed to design single carriageways with safety records even higher than motorways, something believed not to be achievable.

Meanwhile, the Road Safety Foundation suggests that a lick of paint can work wonders. Fatal and serious collisions can be reduced by over 70% by improving road markings and signage, applying high-friction anti-skid treatments at known accident junction hot spots and generally improving the signage and layout of road junctions.

When the cake gets smaller, it is has to be sliced better. Prudent wielding of the knife does not necessarily mean deep cuts have to have the severe repercussions that may be first anticipated. Government and local councils ignore road safety at their peril. If they do and this results in a reversal of the downward trend in road deaths all fleet managers will have to step up to the plate and provide even better driver training and guidance to their ‘at work’ drivers.

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

Drink driving and drug driving deaths and injuries remain unacceptably high. In 2008, 11,000 in the UK alone were killed or injured as a result of driver impairment through drink or drugs. Drunk drivers cause over one in ten road deaths on our roads with 269 recorded deaths caused by drivers over the drink drive limit. And the worst culprits are ‘at work’ drivers.

Research by the road safety charity Brake reveals that 14 per cent of ‘at work’ drivers admitted to consuming three or more units of alcohol before getting behind the wheel. This compares with just six per cent of other drivers. That’s over double the number of ‘at work’ drivers acting irresponsibly!

Even after a heavy night, ‘at work’ drivers act more irresponsibly than other drivers do with a third admitting driving first thing in the morning compared to 21 per cent of other drivers.

The above facts alone should get fleet managers thinking about their duty of care responsibilities and organisations considering their corporate social responsibilities the next time they organise an off-site sales or marketing conference. We’ve all attended such events, where the day’s proceedings are followed up by a celebratory dinner and heavy drinking at the bar till the wee small hours. It happens at awards ceremonies too.

All of us have a moral, as well as a corporate social responsibility, to take stock of our actions and reconsider how we handle certain social situations. The obvious one for an off-site corporate event involving an overnight stay is to limit alcohol intake and wrap up official proceedings at mid-day the following day rather than the night before. As to awards dinners, well there’s no getting away from the fact that it’s natural everyone attending is after a good time and will inevitably let their hair down. How much people consume is down to the individual but inevitably most will still be over the legal limit the morning after. Corporate policy for those attending awards events should be to insist that they leave the car keys behind and attend said events by public transport.

Brake is doing its bit by launching a new campaign called ‘Face Facts’. Posters and e-guides are available to assist fleet managers in alerting company drivers and grey fleet drivers as to the risks of drink and drug driving. The aim of the campaign is to assist fleet managers in identifying drink and drug driving abuse through screening and testing procedures.

Employee drink driving and drug driving rules should be covered by fleet policy and be a key element in any company vehicle driver’s manual. The punishment for transgressing the rules should be instant dismissal. When it comes to such potential dangerous activities, there can be no other corporate option than a zero tolerance policy. Corporate reputation is at stake, not to mention the all-important life of the driver and potential innocent victims of those driver’s actions.

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

Hot on the heels of moves to lower speed limits comes news of a campaign to lower drink-drive limits, something else I predicted in our recent white paper, ‘A vision of fleet management in 2015. Predictions on how the fleet industry could look in the future’.

Safety charity Brake has come down hard on the government for its inertia in a number of areas. While road deaths have fallen to their lowest levels for over 80 years, dipping below 3000 per annum, Brake quite rightly does not want any form of complacency to creep in and is calling for a ten-year road safety plan. Well, fat chance of that if government cannot put together a fully integrated transport policy! After all, road safety would form just one key element of this much needed, and still to be delivered, vision.

In a broadside at government at its annual meeting, Brake accused the government of living “in the stone age” on drink-drive limits. One of its trustees, a solicitor, advised that while many countries had only trace limits and checked one in every two drivers annually we only check fewer than two per cent! While this may sound horrifically low, the cold facts show that positive breath tests are falling so the message is getting across.

In the largest ever national campaign run in the UK over the Christmas and New Year period covering the period between 1 December 2009 and 1 January 2010, 183,397 drivers were breath tested in England and Wales during the four-week campaign. Nationally, 9148 drivers tested were arrested, representing five per cent of the sample. This was reflected in most of the 43 police forces up and down the country and shows a continued fall in those testing positive. However, it still means 300 drivers a day were above the limit.

Apparently, in the last five years of Christmas drink-drive campaigns there has been a year-on-year reduction in the number of collisions in which drinking was a contributory factor. Provisional figures for the latest national campaign indicate a fall in the number of injury road traffic collisions reported during the campaign period compared to the same period last year.

However, in the latest official statistics, in 2007 460 died as a result of drink-driving so that means there can indeed be no room for complacency and more needs to be done, as demanded by Brake.

In our white paper, we predicted that, “given the British Medical Council’s strong views on unhealthy alcohol consumption and its efforts to have all alcohol advertising banned across the board, this will be the trigger to bring current drink-driving limits more into line with Continental Europe.”

And that is not a new stance from me. In a BusinessCar blog dating back to 23 July 2008, I said, “One thing I would agree on is the proposal by the government’s chief medical officer’s call for a zero tolerance approach to teenage drivers involved in accidents after drinking. If the thousand deaths through accidents involving 15 to 24 year-olds mainly involve road accidents then something needs to be done, as the total number of road deaths is now below 3000 for the first time in over 80 years. Apparently, many countries already adopt a zero blood alcohol limit for young drivers and it might help towards addressing the overall binge drinking culture among the young.”

Tackling binge drinking and drink-driving has to be a top priority for any government.

Roddy Graham, Commercial Director

In our recently published white paper entitled ‘A vision of fleet management in 2015. Predictions on how the fleet industry could look in the future’, I predicted that we would see lower speed limits and a network of average speed cameras. Both seem to be coming closer to reality.

First, the controversial subject of lower speed limits. A recent online survey by car supermarket, Motorpoint, revealed that over 82 per cent of drivers would be against the permanent lowering of the national speed limit on sections of the UK motorway network from 70mph to 60mph. This comes after the Department for Transport admitted a lowering of the national speed limit could become reality with speed regulated by overhead average speed cameras, as found on the overhead gantries on the M25, and sensors placed in the road surface.

It may not be a surprise to learn that the vast majority of drivers are opposed to a lowering of speed limits but it might be to learn that the Police is opposed too! In this instance, it relates to proposals to reduce speed limits from 30mph to 20mph in urban areas. Thames Valley Police is against such a move unless it is accompanied by associated traffic calming measures such as speed bumps. The comments follow a proposal from Oxfordshire County Council to reduce the speed limit on at least 24 roads in and around Abingdon.

Merely changing a number according to the Police is not enough. It must be supported by proper traffic engineering to lower speed and should only be introduced where absolutely necessary, such as where children are most at risk. Simply changing the limit alone would only see an average 2mph drop in drivers’ speed.

Meanwhile, Transport for London is apparently trialling average speed cameras in east London between Canning Town and the Goresbrook interchange covering a whole road network section with multiple entrance and exit points. Fully operational by this summer, the road network will be monitored by 84 cameras at 37 different locations.

It’ll be expensive to roll-out but you can bet your bottom dollar that a national network of average speed cameras covering major traffic routes is just around the corner. It’ll prove a nice little earner for local councils and will reduce traffic speed further. At least, it should help save lives too.