Partnership Training with Freight Transport Industry

As part of ensuring everyone’s safety we developed and implemented our No Strikes training initiative with the freight transport industry, to enhance the safety of the public and our workforce.

Through recording near misses and accidents, we identified a high incident rate of HGV collisions with our traffic management vehicles, whilst we were setting our traffic management on the strategic road network. We then worked in partnership with the freight transport association and major national hauliers to develop bespoke training for HGV drivers.

Not stopping at simply developing a training package we wanted to ensure this was embedded in the freight transport industry to ensure a legacy from the initial work. So we worked to get the training accredited by the Joint Approvals Unit for Periodic Training (JAUPT) as part of the mandatory Driver CPC training. Having achieved this accreditation we have cascaded this throughout the freight transport industry reaching over 35,000 professional drivers, through 14 national freight companies.

We went a step further and asked for driver feedback to help shape future policy and methods of working as a direct response to customer feedback, taking information back to the Highways Agency and DfT. This commitment has worked and we have so far received over 2,000 feedback forms from professional freight drivers with a staggering 32,000 years combined experience between them. This feedback is now helping to shape national research.

This example of best practice demonstrates the benefit of committing to go two or three steps below the headline grabbing initiative, to ensure a long term legacy.