By Mark Cartwright, Head of Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention, National Highways
National Highways is committed to the ambition that no one should be harmed while travelling or working on our roads. We create a range of fantastic resources through our fleet engagement platform Driving for Better Business to help fulfil this ambition. These resources are high quality, free to use and often award-winning – and are designed to empower fleets to prevent collisions.
Road safety is a shared responsibility – and we cannot make our 4,500 miles of motorway and A roads safe without the corresponding work of fleets throughout the country, and the efforts of their drivers. We recognise that and so National Highways’ contribution is two-fold – we engineer, manage and maintain some of the safest roads in the world, and we have also created high quality tools and resources to make driver safety management as easy as possible for UK organisations.
If you’ve visited Driving for Better Business, you may already be familiar with the gap analysis, the case studies, the driving for work policy builder and the Van Driver Toolkit – just a few of the free to use, high quality resources available on the DfBB site. We also have suites of presentations and conference excerpts so you can learn from the best without leaving your desk.
Watch this space!
However 2025 will be a year of industry for us as we have been working on a whole new suite of products to equip your managers and drivers with resources too often missing from organisation’s road safety framework.
Here are a few of the resources you can look forward to:
- Incident Investigation Toolkit. Incident investigation is essential for every collision and near miss in order to identify the contributory factors and engineer them out of your operation. Too often incident investigation begins and ends with asking the driver, ‘What happened then?’ and either blaming or exonerating them, depending upon their response. Our toolkit will transform this from a quick ‘fault/no fault’ discussion to a true exploration of the many factors which result in collision – so you can make sure that type of collision doesn’t happen again.
- The Car Driver Toolkit. Our Van Driver Toolkit is an award-winning collection of pdf and video toolbox talks for drivers, coaching them through almost 40 essential topics. The Car Driver Toolkit is its sibling – designed for those people who do not drive a commercial vehicle and so generally do not see themselves as ‘commercial’ or ‘professional’ drivers at all. It will transform their level of knowledge and engagement, about their vehicle, about driving risks, and about how to keep themselves and others safe and healthy as they go about their work.
- Our fleet focus monthly updates are in full swing, with essential topics being brought to managers in perfect lunch-box packages. You’re provided with an intro to the topic, its importance and risks, a legal update by a transport lawyer, and a short, informative piece to give to drivers. There are clear calls to action for managers and for drivers – no fuss, no muss, just nugget sized actionable insights which will help discharge your compliance and duty of care obligations.
- Finally we are producing a comprehensive guide to driver wellbeing. This will walk you through the cultural, management and driver information you need to know to make meaningful change in your drivers’ health and well-being – and in doing substantially reduce your road risk exposure, your sick leave, absenteeism and presenteeism costs, and improve morale, retention and your brand reputation. We look at physical health, mental health, managing life-phase changes, as well as the implications of various states of being on the driving decisions we make. This guide will help you to ensure that your drivers are every bit as roadworthy as your vehicles.
Not signed up to Driving for Better Business? You are seriously missing a trick. If you ever drive for work, or manage anyone who does, regardless of the frequency or the vehicle, or your primary role – DfBB is for you. It is your guide to staying safe on the road and your organisation’s guide for ensuring that every driver, vehicle and route taken is not only compliant but safe.
Check out Driving for Better Business and choose a place to start. One action with which we’ll support you. Let’s make 2025 the year of driver safety.
