At National Highways road safety is our top priority, and our ambition is that no one should be harmed while using the road network. Mark Cartwright, Head of Commercial Vehicle Incident Prevention at National Highways caught up with Charlotte Le Maire, the founder of LMP Legal, a law firm specialising in fleet regulation and safety, to discuss her key safety tips for fleets
Tell us a little about your role?
I’m a partner at LMP Legal, which I founded four years ago to support fleets and drivers when the worst occurs, but more importantly perhaps to help them prevent disaster from happening. So despite being lawyers, we spend a lot of time training and educating managers and drivers about their legal responsibilities, and what can happen if they get it wrong. That has a certain white-coat effect, because just discussing the possible penalties makes many people more careful. We take that conversation further though, into driver health, fatigue, distraction, and also examining near misses and minor collisions in order to help them prevent major collisions. I spend more of my time running my business now, but I’m qualified as a solicitor and a barrister, so I still act as a solicitor advocate representing client fleets in court in higher profile cases.
What do you see as the biggest challenge facing your clients?
Drivers are the biggest risk in any fleet organisation, but also of course, their biggest asset. We need to remember that most fleets are running a commercial operation, and yet are expected to stay on top of very onerous regulation which takes a lot of time and resource despite their margins being tiny.
It’s important that they not only create and communicate policies, but that those policies are understood, enforced and evidenced. We mainly work with HGV and bus/coach fleets because they are operating under the auspices of O-licensing. However, vans, company cars and grey fleet also represent a huge risk in terms of road safety, and to employers. Even though there is not the same explicit regulation governing vans and cars, employers are still obliged to manage the risk to their employees and the public. However, the training is not there in many of these firms. And it is a training issue – most people simply do not understand road risk or that driving a vehicle is the most dangerous thing they do in a day. People are complacent about road risk and believe that they are entitled to drive, regardless of how much sleep or alcohol they had the night before.
We know of employers’ responsibilities, but in practice doesn’t the legal responsibility tend to stop with the driver?
That is changing a little. There is an intent now for police and HSE to work together more where there may be organisational failure under section 2 and 3 of the Health and Safety at Work Act, leading to a collision. It’s still not as common as it should be, but I have sat in on joint interviews held by the police and HSE. Certainly no fleet should think they have a get out of jail free card on the basis that road collisions are a driver problem. The Renown Consultants case in 2020 saw HSE bring a successful prosecution against an employer for failure to manage driver fatigue and working hours in their van fleet.
What makes a good fleet partner or client for you?
I need to see a top-level commitment in companies. If the board buys into the idea of safety, then you can achieve something, but if the board is not on board, you’ll never create meaningful change in drivers. Ignorance isn’t a problem, in that many companies tell us they are not where they should be or don’t know enough, but they want to improve – and we can work with that. That’s a journey you can help them on. But I have walked away in cases where the board isn’t committed.
For resources, videos and road-risk reduction tools, head to National Highways fleet engagement programme, Driving for Better Business.
Charlotte Le Maire
Founder, LMP Legal
