Senior TC homes in on driver welfare in conference address

Senior traffic commissioner (STC) Kevin Rooney placed driver welfare at the heart of his keynote address in Sparkford, Somerset to the first of the year’s Logistics UK Transport Manager conferences – and his message was reinforced with news about practical steps taken in this direction by 3PL giant Wincanton in conjunction with Loughborough University.

First, on compliance, Mr Rooney warned operators to ensure that they filled in online licence application forms themselves, and did not delegate the process to a consultant.

“Do your own applications for accuracy. Ticking a wrong box before clicking send will mean you have made a false statement on your application, and that will lead you straight to a PI [public inquiry].

“Most of the licence applications we get are wrong first time,” he reported.

“If you have a query, then VOL messaging is the best way to raise it. But don’t send a follow-up message, or the query will go straight to the back of the queue again,” he warned.

He cautioned operators to monitor their IT system security: VOL had been subject to “state level attacks” and the incidence of these was increasing.

He also warned against letting others share system logins to “pass themselves off” as the operator.

The TCs were no longer seeing the “massive drivers’ hours frauds that we used to, but we are seeing more failures to download tachographs.”

As one in four public inquiries ended in a licence revocation, he urged operators who got a call-up letter to seek immediate professional help.

Public inquiries were only part of the TCs’ work. They also conducted 15,000 driver conduct hearings a year.

“This additional scrutiny of driver conduct beyond the court system was required because “large vehicles were disproportionately involved in KSI incidents.”

“There are 15,000 driver conduct hearings a year, and it’s quite a brutal process,” he admitted. “They are conducted at a rate of five every half-hour, and very few drivers are legally represented: they don’t have the money.”

He explained that it was a risk-assessment process, and the TCs had the power to suspend or revoke a driver’s vocational licence.

Turning to the hot issue of bridge strikes, he said that the starting point for a driver who stuck a bridge was a six-month suspension.

But TCs were now taking a holistic view as to why each incident occurred, as bridge strikes were rarely down to driver error alone. They usually resulted from a cumulation of errors and omissions.

He recounted the tale of a driver who was involved in a bridge strike. The driver was on a zero-hours contract and had requested the day off as he had to take his wife to hospital for a cancer appointment that afternoon. He was pressured to come in early and do ‘local work’, but ended up being allocated to a run that would have taken the rest of the day.

All the trucks on the fleet had incorrect height indicators as this was ‘company policy’. He struck a low bridge when taking the usual route to the motorway.

STC Rooney said the driver should never have been put behind the wheel of a truck that day. His boss had failed to pass on to the client (who actually allocated each driver’s work) that the driver should not be sent on a long run. The driver had little knowledge of who the transport manager was, other than he “came in at weekends”.

Other matters of concern with the company emerged at public inquiry. The company lost its licence, and the transport manager’s repute was tarnished, but the driver faced no further action.

“I cannot recall the last time I called in a driver alone for a bridge strike,” the STC said.

“You need to look after your drivers,” he told the assembled transport managers. “Transport managers must take responsibility for their drivers’ welfare.”

Worryingly the STC reported that he now saw as many drivers before him for drug-driving as drunk-driving. They had to apply for the return of their vocational licence after serving a driving ban.

“The starting point has always been that they would have to wait four weeks for the return of their vocational licence for every year they had been banned.

“The justification was that it gave drivers a chance to get back into the swing of things by driving small vehicles before getting behind the wheel of a truck, but this may not be the best policy,” the STC suggested.

“In fact, some drivers won’t get the opportunity to drive a smaller vehicle, as they will have had to sell their cars as a result of the ban. In other cases, drivers tell me they have been cycling to work while serving their driving bans and are now very aware of traffic dangers.

“The industry loses 15,000 driver months a year as a result of this policy.”

Stacy Clemes, professor of active living and public health at Loughborough University, picked up the theme of driver welfare: particularly physical health.

She said the high health risks of vocational driving were well-documented: particularly obesity and heart conditions. Studies in the USA had revealed that obese drivers tended to have 55 per cent more road accidents than their slimmer counterparts, while in the UK vocational drivers had some of the lowest life expectancies in the country.

“Just sitting in a driver’s seat for eight to ten hours a day is a health risk,” she said.

This combined with other factors including poor diet, long hours, dehydration, poor sleep and stress to have a marked impact on health. “Overall, driver health and well-being are declining faster than for the rest of the UK population,” she reported.

“We are seeing high levels of obesity among drivers than the total UK population, and younger drivers particularly are far more likely to be obese than their non-driving counterparts.”

There was a desperate shortage of serious research: “There are only 19 known studies globally into the health of professional drivers, compared to hundreds of thousands covering office workers,” she said.

Enter SHIFT: Standard Health Interventions for Transport. This had been evolved from health education programmes offered to heart and diabetes patients to provide diet and exercise advice specially tailored for truck drivers. For example, some of the exercise elements could be undertaken using resistance bands in the cab passenger seat during delays or breaks from driving.

A seven-hour interactive SHIFT education programme had been accredited as a Driver CPC module, and a condensed one-hour programme dubbed ShortSHIFT had also been produced for slotting into existing training modules.

SHIFT training had been trialled with logistics giant Wincanton. The results were encouraging: 83 per cent of drivers who had done the ShortShift module had found it interesting and subsequently 77 per cent reported that it had encouraged them to change their behaviour. A new SHIFT programme was in development for bus and coach drivers, and was being trialled with Plymouth City Bus.