In the spotlight with Simon Turner

How did you get into the health and safety industry?

I’ve been involved in marketing and strategic communications for over 35 years and had my own agency. In the mid-2000s, I realised I had a number of clients who were either involved in providing driver training or risk management, or else they were companies that used these services.

I’d always been a ‘petrol head’ and I’d undertaken lots of advanced driver training for racing and track days but the concept of driver competence from a company point of view was completely new to me and I found it fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that I decided on a change of career and started a new business helping employers identify and manage driver safety – I was also the director in charge of a fleet of 10 vehicles for our sales and training teams so I learnt a lot from managing the risk to protect my own drivers and company.

We’d collaborated with the Driving for Better Business programme during this period and the opportunity arose for me to take on the management of this late in 2015 – an opportunity I felt was perfectly suited to my previous experience and I’ve been there ever since.

What do you enjoy most about your job?

A lot of safety and risk management strategies require some investment which, in driver safety, might include training or installing vehicle telematics. These can have long sales cycles and many companies are still reticent about investing in safety, despite the significant cost savings and other benefits that can come out of it, on top of the obvious safety improvements.

Driving for Better Business is an entirely free business engagement programme so I really love the fact that I can talk to safety managers about the best ways of improving driver safety without the pressure of having to sell them anything – it’s literally just about raising awareness and sharing good practice.

I also get to work with some extremely well-known high-performing businesses where managing health and safety well has played a vital part in that success. Seeing smaller businesses learn from this good practice and start to achieve similar results is also really rewarding.

What’s unique about Driving for Better Business?

Our programme is entirely free because we’re part of, and fully funded by, National Highways – the company that operates and maintains our high-speed road network of motorways and major A roads. We use our budget to develop tools and resources that driver safety managers can use for free, and to share what we do through publications like this, along with webinars, conferences, exhibitions and social media – we’re particularly active on LinkedIn which is where a lot of new companies find us.

Sometimes people confuse us with an accreditation scheme like FORS (Freight Operators Recognition Scheme) or CHAS (Constructors Health And Safety scheme) but the reality is we work closely with, and fully support, these and other schemes as valuable ways to improve and validate standards of driver safety management.

What are your most memorable successes at Driving for Better Business?

We’ve won a number of awards over the last few years including a prestigious Prince Michael International Road Safety Award. These are great but, for me, our best success is actually our most recent because we’ve been able to reach businesses that really need our help.

Our digital team were doing some work to improve our success in online search results and found huge numbers of companies looking for help with their driving for work policy – a legal requirement that’s so essential to get right. We spent six months developing a free online tool to help managers create and communicate a good practice driving for work policy using pre-written templates which we launched recently and the response has been amazing. In just the few weeks since launch we’ve had almost 300 organisations sign up to either create a new policy or review an existing one.

The policy builder also has a really important function for alerting users to updates in changes to legislation or official guidance that could affect their policy. Even big organisations with established policies are signing up just for that feature alone. This is amazing to think we’ve had such an important impact on so many businesses in such a short time.

What’s next in the pipeline for Driving for Better Business?

A few years ago we created our Van Driver Toolkit – a series of safety updates for employers to share with their van drivers covering almost 40 topics such as driver fatigue, distraction, impairment, vehicle checks, safe loading, winter driving, etc. They are available as web pages, PDFs, animations and even pre-recorded video toolbox talks and all free to download.

We won a fleet safety product award for it and have been inundated with requests for a car driver version ever since. I’m pleased to say we’re now working on this and hope to launch it in January 2025 along with an updated van driver toolkit.

What’s your vision for the future of Driving for Better Business?

We want Driving for Better Business to be the go-to place - a ‘one-stop shop’ for anything employers need to understand occupational road risk and what good practice looks like. Our goal is that every employer has a good practice Driving for Work policy. It’s that vital first step on the road to driver safety and compliance, and the root from which all other benefits stem, whether that be incident reduction, performance improvement or cost efficiency.

What do you think are the biggest challenges facing the health and safety industry?

There are two that we’re seeing, specifically relevant to driver safety, but they also apply in a wider health and safety context. The first is the need to demonstrate strong and effective safety management systems. In our world, this starts with the Driving for Work policy, accurate record keeping – including incidents and near-misses – and regular management reporting, but it extends to systems that monitor compliance and documents that effective interventions have taken place.

We’re increasingly seeing this as a client requirement for large companies as part of the new business tendering process. It doesn’t end there though, because there is also a responsibility on a main contractor to ensure the presence of good safety management systems down through their own supply chain. Companies that aren’t able to demonstrate these systems are in place could find themselves losing out on new work, or even being kicked off existing supplier lists.

The second challenge is the amount of data generated by safety monitoring systems. Again, in our world, this could be data from vehicle telematics systems or a database of driver records and vehicle activity. Hidden in all this data could be vital red flags that a risk is present – for instance, a high-risk driver who is constantly speeding but hasn’t been noticed because they’ve avoided a crash so far. Unfortunately for the data owner, in law, if you possess the data then you’re deemed to have knowledge of the data and should have acted. In this instance a safety manager could be held responsible for not acting on data that highlighted the high-risk driver, even though they hadn’t actually seen it.

We’re now seeing companies using technology such as AI to interrogate these masses of data to identify risks and red flags, that would otherwise go unnoticed, in order to effect changes and interventions before something more serious can occur.

Simon Turner is campaign manager, Driving for Better Business. You can access the free Driving for Work Policy Builder at www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com