National Highways calls on supply chain to drive LCV legal Compliance

National Highways is calling on companies to use their procurement power to encourage van fleets to take advantage of its Van Driver Toolkit, a simple guide to LCV legal compliance, safety and best practice.

The toolkit is free to download and is designed to be practical, user-friendly and easy for companies to share with drivers.

National Highways Head of Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention Mark Cartwright says there are over 4.5 million vans on UK roads, most involved in commercial activity, and yet there is an astonishing lack of knowledge among van drivers about legal compliance. This is worrying given that they consist of 16% of all traffic by mileage, and complete 55.5bn miles annually.

“The data from enforcement activities on the strategic road network suggests that many van driver offences are caused by ignorance,” he says. “Often transport is not a core activity for companies with LCV fleets, which can mean that employers are also ignorant of the regulations governing van use.”

Cartwright says the toolkit is designed to “dispel myths, fill knowledge gaps and make van drivers and the road network safer”.

The toolkit comprises a series of concise, illustrated, downloadable pdfs, which can be emailed or added to a drivers’ app for reference. Topics include:

· The rules governing vans and safe driving

· Licence qualifications

· Fitness to drive (drink, drugs, fatigue, medical conditions)

· Vehicle safety

· Driving safely

· Smart driving

· Seasonal driving

“We want to arm van drivers with the knowledge they need to stay safe and protect themselves from unwittingly breaking the law,” says Cartwright.

“So far 1,200 organisations have registered to download the toolkit, covering 1.2m vehicles between them,” says Cartwright. “That’s almost one-quarter of the vans on the road. Now we must reach the other 75%.”

Dave Conway, IMS & Road Safety Manager at civil engineering company FM Conway says the guides are the best pre-prepared resource he has seen. “We uploaded them to our education platform and ask our 600 van drivers to work through one module per month. You can tell they are good when even our HGV drivers, who are not mandated to do this training, still read and comment on them.”

Mick Kiely, fleet manager at railway infrastructure company TES 2000, introduced National Highways resources for his 160 non-professional van drivers when he joined the company 18 months ago. “We use the Van Driver Toolkit in small sections as toolbox talks. Our drivers were often not aware of even basic vehicle management. This has helped us cut our accident rate by 52% and our insurance premiums by 35%.

“Well designed resources like this make every fleet manager’s job easier,” he adds. “I recommend the VDT to other fleets as often as possible.”

He says the short practical formats allow him to drip feed important messaging, without exhausting his drivers’ interest.

The power of procurement

Cartwright says that many companies underestimate the potential they have to improve road safety when putting contracts out to tender.

“Most vans are being used for work, and the companies using them have clients. If those clients mandated that all van drivers carrying out tasks on their behalf were to read and understand this toolkit, it could have a huge effect on road safety,” he says.

In 2020, almost 10,500 vans were involved in collisions, 176 of them in fatal collisions, and more than 2,000 in incidents causing serious injury. According to the Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety, vans are the ‘other vehicle’ in collisions ten times as often as cars.

“By distance travelled, vans and light goods vehicles, followed by HGVs, have the highest rate of deaths of other road users,” says its report What Kills Most On The Roads?

“As the number of vans continues to grow apace, it’s imperative that we make their drivers and their use safer,” says Cartwright. “It is not only drivers who have statutory responsibilities on the road, but also employees who have health and safety obligations to their staff and to the public.”

The toolkit is just one of the ways in which National Highways, together with its fleet road safety initiative Driving for Better Business, is trying to meet its pledge of zero harm on the strategic road network by 2040.

“Our infrastructure is much safer than it used to be, and vehicles are also designed to be much safer. The last major challenge is for us to teach drivers to be safer,” says Cartwright. “The Van Driver Toolkit can help fleets achieve this.”