Letters to Fleet News editor Martyn Moore.

Emphasis should be on safety - not cost savings.

I read with interest, the article by John Maslen, regarding cost saving due to driver training. 

Firstly, I am a big believer in doing what we can to improve driving standards and make our roads safer for all, but whenever a study is made on the cost savings as a result of training, as opposed to the safety aspect, unbelievable statistics run riot. 

The study stated that employees that were under a risk management programme had an accident rate of 25% – 25% of WHAT?

Am I to believe that 25 out of 100 employees on a risk assessment programme were crashing. That does not sound good to me.

Even more staggering, it stated employees not on the risk assessment programme were crashing at a rate of 78 out of a 100.

If these figures are correct then I would not train these people. I would suggest they look for a job that does not include driving.

Later in the report it stated that one business had scrapped its safety investment programme, and the claim frequency more than doubled with crash costs rising from £100 per incident average to £250. Really? 

What were they crashing into, to average £100 a repair, perhaps those eastern European cars from the 1980s.

But seriously, if we are going to encourage safe driving, it has to be because of safety and not how it affects the bottom line. 

Forget the statistics and let’s get people interested in driving better and more safely for the good of all. 

The benefit will be clear for all to see, without the bean counters trying to justify decisions one way or another.
Keep up the good work.

GRAHAM CARROLL
(Courier)
via email

 

Official figures hinder fleets' safety efforts.

Surely the many fleet professionals who strive to improve road safety would be astonished to find that the government disregards their efforts.

How else can it explain the deliberate exclusion of work-related fatalities from its official statistics for workplace deaths in Britain?

The Health and Safety Executive’s (HSE) own published estimate for fatalities caused by work-related road crashes in Britain is more than 1,000 every year.

However, the official figure for all deaths at work in Britain in 2007-08, released recently by the HSE, was 228.

That is because the HSE counts only deaths in factories and similar workplaces. 

A busy director who sees the headline figure of 228 deaths a year may assume it includes working drivers killed in crashes.

If they do, any conclusions they draw about the level of risk to their own company’s drivers will be dangerously optimistic.

The HSE’s under-reporting of deaths at work undermines attempts by responsible organisations and businesses in the fleet industry to raise awareness of the need for careful management of road risks.

The HSE must be completely open about the real number of workplace deaths in future announcements. 

The road safety benefits of such a move would be huge, especially for the tens of thousands of firms and millions of drivers who are being lulled into a false sense of security by the HSE’s very partial headline statistics.

MARK SINCLAIR
Director, Alphabet