Driver CPC

driver behaviour that could increase risk, using telematics and other assessments to maintain vigilance and promote better road safety,” she says.

Road safety consultant Graham Feest agrees. “Drivers make mistakes. However, if you look behind the statistics, what fuels those mistakes is lack of compliance. We do have a big compliance issue. Driver training is questionable as to its overall benefit in reducing crashes.”

So the DCPC and other training may give valuable marginal gains in low-risk drivers, and improve compliance on specific operational issues – but does it fundamentally change driver behaviour, which has the greatest impact on road safety?

On-road behaviour

RED’s Morris believes that high-risk driver training should be in-cab. One-on-one sessions teach most effectively, but also allow the trainer to identify the necessary motivators for behavioural change, whether they are environmental, safety, personal or financial.

“People are innately wired to behave in certain ways and this affects their decision making and behaviour on the road,” he says. “If we look at an issue like tailgating, drivers have often been reinforced in this behaviour for many years because they have never run into the back of anyone. However, they have had rear-end shunts which they blame on the driver behind them and do not link to their own harsh braking.”

So while operational skills and protocols can benefit from frequent refreshing – XPO highlights coupling need to be managed out of the business. A carrot and stick approach is the way forward. Most people come to work wanting to do a good job, so it is worth building on that.

“If training and support interventions fail to improve the driver’s performance to an acceptable level, HR processes should remove the individual from driving on safety grounds.”

He emphasises the role of the company’s culture and the safety attitudes embedded in every layer of the operation and management. “Behaviour in a business emanates from the leadership and management of the business,” he says.

Given the amount of training and monitoring in fleets, it should be possible to demonstrate clear improvements in terms of basic compliance.

It is not possible to gauge the number of incidents prevented, but operators can look at proxy figures such as incidental damage and fuel usage. Yet operators who pay attention to driver training almost always list lowspeed manoeuvres as their most common and intractable issue – one that has little to do with skill and arguably a lot to do with driver focus, awareness and patience.

Government speeding data shows that more than 40% of HGVs routinely break the speed limit on urban roads, and their speed compliance is only improved on motorways where many of them are speed limited (in Conway’s terms a ‘hard’ not a ‘soft’ fix).

In this context, it is hard to see the positive effect of