The CILT Transport and Logistics Safety Forum hosted their annual conference last week, in partnership with AA DriveTech at The AA, Basingstoke. Our drivers, our fleets, our responsibility: Raising Professional Driving Standards was the title of this year’s conference and focussed on sharing best practice and raising professional driving standards.

The event reflected on the recent launch of the Forum’s award winning videoOur vehicles, our safety, our responsibility: Improving road safety for vulnerable road users, which has now been developed into a brand new, and completely free, interactive training programme to accompany the video.

The programme, entitled: Managing Risk in the Supply Chain, is now incorporated into FORS, ROSPA and other high profile training courses. Delegates attending were able to take the programme away with them.

Speaking at the event, Glen Davies FCILT, said: ‘It is a really powerful video, which has had thousands of hits online. Eighteen months on from the release, we asked ourselves; ‘how can we get this to reach out to a wider audience so that more organisations can benefit?’’

The decision was taken to create a training programme and push the video into an interactive environment. Glen said: ‘To build on the success of the video, we developed it into a training programme that would highlight the video’s key lessons and objectives. One thing that is vital to the short video is the moral, economic and legal messages it drives home. It was important to us that our training programme tackled these as a broad package of obligations.’

The video has been broken down into six clips, and each has been developed into a lesson plan. Glen said: ‘The lesson plans have been well thought out and carefully put together. The trainer knows that these have been professionally designed and are easy to pick up and deliver. We have produced a package where a whole lot of activity can be achieved around this one resource.’

Throughout the afternoon, delegates split up into working groups to explore four key areas of driver management: employment, performance management, health and safety, and training and development. The outputs from these sessions will inform the development of a driver management framework to support the industry, both passenger and freight, in dramatically improving driver performance. The Institute aims to develop this programme into an industry code of practice to manage driver behaviour in a consistent way throughout the profession.

Adrian Colman, Chief Executive, Wincanton Group, applauded CILT’s efforts in creating this training kit and underlined the importance of managing driver behaviour. He said ‘It is important to us that we protect our colleagues and our brand by managing our drivers. There needs to be different approaches to managing drivers in the demanding environment that we now work, and it is important that in the boardroom we understand the physical and mental demands on our drivers.’

Alison Moriarty CMILT also underlined the importance of managing driver risk as she highlighted recent fatalities involving HGV’s to warn operators of the consequences of mismanagement.

David Richards, Head of Marketing, AA DriveTech closed the Conference by outlining his research into how working drivers contribute to collisions, and the lessons the CILT Transport & Logistics Safety Forum can embed into their training programme.