If a 19-year-old apprentice arrived on Monday morning and you immediately put them in charge of a piece of dangerous and heavy machinery that they had never used before – no induction, no assessment, no training and no supervision – you would expect a very difficult conversation with HSE when that apprentice hurt themselves, which they probably would do, sooner rather than later.

Yet many organisations do precisely that, every week of the year, with a common piece of dangerous and heavy machinery known as a van.

Work-related road risk remains the unseen orphan of occupational safety: the activity that kills more employees than anything else on the risk register. In 2025/26, 230 people (126 workers and 104 members of the public) were killed in workplace incidents. Yet 445 people were killed in collisions that involved at least one person who was driving for work – and we know this is underreported. That’s twice as many fatalities yet you probably didn’t know that because it isn’t RIDDOR reportable.

The risk is multiplied when we put a young driver behind the wheel of a van, especially if they have never driven one before. It has restricted visibility, no rear-view mirror, is harder to manoeuvre, handles differently to a car, and handles differently when loaded or unloaded. The driver sits higher, which distorts the perception of speed, and different speed limits apply. A van very often carries different safety technology from the driver’s own car, meaning the automatic emergency braking or lane-keeping system they have unconsciously come to rely on simply is not there.

So, while a driver’s licence may say they can drive a van, common sense says they will need training to do so safely – to check it, load it, manoeuvre it, drive it at speed and stop it safely. The Health and Safety at Work Act says the same: “Employers must provide whatever information, instruction, training, and supervision are necessary to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the health and safety at work of all employees.”

And by young drivers we don’t just mean 17-year-olds. The young driver bracket covers 17 to 24 years old. It includes all your apprentices and all your graduates.

The competence fiction

Driving is the only high-hazard activity in British industry where employers routinely accept a third-party certificate as conclusive proof of competence, and then never test the assumption again.

Employers must stop confusing legality with readiness – a licence is the starting point, not the finishing line. Consider what that licence actually evidences. DVLA figures show the average learner completes around 45 hours of lessons and 22 hours of private practice. But there is no minimum on-road requirement in Great Britain. Two people holding identical licences may have wildly different exposure to real conditions – night driving, adverse weather, heavy traffic, motorways. The document does not distinguish between them and neither, usually, does the employer.

Now set that against the risk profile. Drivers aged 17 to 24 hold 6% of licences in Great Britain but are involved in around 20% or one fifth of fatal and serious collisions. Around one in three road fatalities UK-wide involves someone driving or riding for work. Where those groups intersect – apprentices, graduates, early-career delivery staff or service engineers – sits a concentration of risk that would trigger immediate intervention in any other operational context.

Driving for Better Business has recently produced a free guide to managing risk for young and inexperienced van drivers which includes some eye-oping case studies. At SP Electricity North West, a review was triggered when a report into vehicles on their fleet found younger and newer drivers heavily over-represented, clustered around slow-speed manoeuvring, reversing and misjudging vehicle size. Their apprentices were averaging three collisions a month.

Compounding all of this is a mechanism that safety professionals will recognise – that confidence usually builds at a much faster rate than competence. After a fortnight, a driver reasonably concludes they have got the hang of it. The genuine ability to react correctly and immediately takes far longer. In that gap, drivers become complacent – they stop identifying hazards properly and often revert to car habits such as higher speeds and closer following – and it is when the risk is at its highest

Stop treating young drivers like adults

There’s a reason why young drivers crash more in company vehicles – we treat them like adults. We know that young people’s brains aren’t fully developed until their mid to late twenties yet we often persist in putting these young recruits through a standard intensive induction process. Maybe two days vehicle familiarisation before they’re sent out solo on their first job. Many adults struggle with this – young drivers have no chance. The learning doesn’t stick because it is being delivered in way proven to be ineffective, with the result our young drivers crash much more often.

Five controls that work

When we looked at what employers, including SP Electricity North West and Northern Powergrid, who had solved this problem were doing, we found five core actions. They translate cleanly into any existing safety management system.

1. Operate a permit to drive. This is a company authorisation with a higher threshold than the statutory licence: driver assessment, induction workshop, a minimum of two days’ familiarisation and training, an eyesight test, and a pass-or-fail outcome. It should carry entry criteria. Northern Powergrid requires young drivers to have held a full licence for two years, to carry fewer than seven points, and to have no convictions for mobile phone use or drink or drug driving. Critically, it must be revocable if standards fall.

2. Deliver a genuine vehicle induction. Not a walk-around. Cover controls and ADAS systems including their limitations, how and why the van handles differently, applicable speed limits, safe and secure loading, and the daily pre-use check.

3. Distribute the training. This was, in my view, the most important finding from the case studies. The conventional two-day intensive induction followed by solo deployment does not work, particularly for young drivers. Splitting training into half-day modules across four to six weeks improves retention, avoids cognitive overload and, crucially, puts real-world driving between sessions, so content lands against experience and drivers return with questions.

4. Monitor behaviour and coach from data. Telematics is needed because coaching conversations without data become subjective and lose their force. Reward improvement rather than only sanctioning failure. John Wilkinson of Northern Powergrid frames it for his drivers as “a friend in the cab, not the foe,” and notes it has repeatedly exonerated them.

5. Mentor, with no solo driving. Six weeks minimum for any new van driver, extended to six months for under-25s. Select mentors based on behaviour and attitude rather than simply time in the job, invest time in training them, and reward their success.

Underpinning all five is the culture point that will be familiar from any other hazard: none of it survives contact with a new employee who watches experienced colleagues cut corners.

The evidence and the cost argument

SP Electricity North West restructured its induction into four weekly half-day sessions, brought in professional trainers, added expert input on cognitive development, and invited bereaved parents from road safety charity Brake to speak to apprentices in person. When we spoke to them eleven months after they implemented their new programme, their apprentices had not been involved in a single collision. On the previous rate, that meant roughly 33 collisions did not happen. The first year also produced a 22% reduction in vehicle incidents and a 10% cut in the insurance premium.

Northern Powergrid, already a well-run fleet, moved to a six-week distributed model and saw telematics scores improve and collisions fall further. These changes were implemented for all drivers with standards improving company-wide, whatever the driver’s age.

You might think that increasing the amount of time off the road for training, or installing telematics is unaffordable, but crashing is an expensive activity. Replacing a modern van wing mirror following a minor incident – one that has electric adjustment, an indicator repeater and radar sensor – can cost more to replace than three years worth of telematics subscription for that vehicle. And that’s without the business disruption caused by the van being off the road for the repair. The cost of a third-party claim because your young van driver injured another road user will be much more sobering.

Full circle

Now return to Monday morning, and your new apprentice being given the keys to their van. Forget it’s a van for a moment and think of it as a three and a half tone piece of dangerous machinery.

How confident are you that your current induction, assessment and training regime means they are guaranteed to operate it safely and not put themselves or anyone else at risk? Worrying, isn’t it?

Simon Turner is engagement manager for the National Highways Driving for Better Business Programme. For more information, visit www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/suppor