Road incidents: out of site, out of mind

A lack of direction in reporting incidents off site is hampering the industry’s efforts to improve cyclist safety, argues Lafarge Tarmac’s Sean McGrae.

In 2013, 109 cyclists were killed and 3,143 were seriously injured in road accidents in England, Scotland and Wales. While the number of deaths was 8% less than the 2012 figure, the total cyclist casualties were up 18% compared to the average for 2005 to 2009, and precipitated further concern about the number of avoidable incidents on the UK’s roads.

Even one death is one too many, so it is positive that efforts are being made to improve safety and avoid accidents, from the introduction of 20mph urban speed limits, to calls by the Transport Committee for the government to increase investment in cycling infrastructure to £10 per head by 2020.

While these initiatives, if implemented, would contribute to improving safety, the construction industry and those monitoring safety standards can do more to support this focus by addressing the blind spot that currently exists between incidents occurring on site and those that happen on our roads. The former are comprehensively reported, while reporting on the latter, which occur beyond a site’s gates, is lacking.

The need to give more focus to off-site incidents is supported by evidence which shows that heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) are disproportionately involved in fatal collisions with cyclists: 20% of cycling fatalities in the last five years involved HGVs, despite the vehicles only accounting for 5% of motor traffic. In London, HGVs have been involved in 37% of cycling fatalities since 2009, despite accounting for just 3% of motor traffic on the capital’s roads.

With many construction materials companies subcontracting deliveries to third party hauliers and owner-operator drivers, who are significant users of the UK’s roads, there is clearly a need to account for the safety behaviours of this population of drivers.

Currently, the Health and Safety Executive (HSE) gathers casualty and incident statistics for work-related activities on site via the Reporting of Injuries, Diseases and Dangerous Occurrences Regulations (RIDDOR) 2013. If there is any spike in injuries or deaths at a site, the HSE would thoroughly investigate the incidents to ensure that appropriate action is taken.

However, there is no organisation that records incidents once drivers have left a site, since RIDDOR does not extend to work-related deaths and injuries beyond the site gates. Any incident or fatality that occurs outside of a construction site is dealt with by the police and Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), and the company in question would note and investigate the incident. No industry-wide record is made, which contributes to a lack of statistics, a coordinated approach and understanding of these incidents.

This is clearly a responsibility gap, and is why we are calling for greater accountability for industry groups and companies to extend their safety behaviours and monitoring beyond the scope of sites. By working with drivers across the supply chain and encouraging a culture of safety across all operators, we, as an industry, can demonstrate our collective commitment to vulnerable road user (VRU) safety and make a lasting difference to improving road safety through coordinated, targeted action.

At Lafarge Tarmac, we are driving a number of initiatives that are helping us to deliver safety improvements and take on greater responsibility for our hauliers’ safety behaviours, including:

• Introduction of a new senior role within our safety and health team to specifically focus on transport.
• Investing more than £500,000 over the next 18 months to retrofit our subcontractors’ vehicles with cycle safety equipment. This translates into roughly 1,500 vehicles being made safer.
• Training all drivers on VRU safety.
• Educating our hauliers via our 30 trained Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme (FORS) auditors, who have so far covered 400 hauliers representing 700 vehicles.
• Looking to extend the requirement for FORS to all our supply chain across the country, including all subcontractors and spot hires.

This approach to increased responsibility has helped us to educate hauliers on the issue of cycle safety and raise the standards of safety for all road users. We have seen first hand the improvement this has made for hauliers, in helping to give them a greater consciousness of all VRUs.

While this action goes some way to improving road safety, we must also explore the practicalities of extending RIDDOR and/or working with bodies such as the HSE to address the blind spot between site and road incidents.

Another proactive step would be for construction materials firms to get behind the “Standard for Construction Logistics” that has been developed by the Construction Logistics and Cyclist Safety (CLOCS) industry working group. It is vital that a consistent standard for cycle-safe HGV fleets is adopted on a national scale, and CLOCS is key to achieving this. Not only would it help improve VRU safety through the design and manufacture of safer new vehicles, but also help to gather data to enable more targeted action.

We must ensure that the learning gathered through the new CLOCS Manager application is shared and made available. This is a new app, which will provide a central database for the industry to record incidents so that patterns can be quickly and easily identified, and we can learn from others’ experiences to prevent repeat occurrences.

Sean McGrae is senior national transport manager at Lafarge Tarmac. Read the results of CM’s road safety survey here