Driving Safely

Labour Research
01/02/2003 An increasing number of employees are having to drive significant distances as part of their job. It's easy to underestimate the Health & Safety implications. Labour Research (Feb 2003) carried this report:

Fatigue: the hidden killer

The Selby rail crash, caused by a car driver falling asleep at the wheel, highlighted the dangers of driving while tired. Labour Research looks at the growing problem of fatigue for workers who drive for a living.

Gary Couser died instantly when his car ran off the road. He had fallen asleep after working a series of shifts, some lasting more than 16 hours. During the six weeks before his death in 2000, Couser had made deliveries all over Britain. He was the only driver at Scottish firm Glenhire whose vehicle had not been fitted with a tachograph to record his driving hours. His case came to light in December when the owner of the firm was fined just £2,500 for breaches of health and safety regulations. After the hearing, Couser's mother said she was "disgusted" at the outcome. Cases like this are as tragic as they are frequent. Fatigue is an everyday cause of incidents and injuries at work, but especially for workers who drive as part of their job.

Driver fatigue often leads to vehicles veering off the road, or to head-on collisions, with the resulting injury and loss of life. This is what happened in the high-profile Selby rail crash in 2001. Gary Hart fell asleep at the wheel of his car and ended up on a railway line, causing the derailment of two trains and the deaths of 10 passengers and four rail workers.

Research into driver fatigue makes frightening reading. Fatigue causes a road death on average almost every day of the year.

Transport minister David Jamieson, announcing the government's THINK advertising campaign last year, said that "drivers falling asleep could be a factor in one in 10 fatal and injury accidents on our roads - resulting in 300 deaths and many thousands of injuries a year".

A Department for Transport research report published in February 2002, "Sleep-related vehicle accidents on sections of selected trunk roads and motorways in the UK (1995-1998)", revealed that sleepiness causes nearly one in five road traffic accidents, and one in four of those on motorways.

Even this might not reveal the true picture as there is evidence that police data underestimate fatigue-related incidents. The TUC believes that, because police investigate road traffic deaths as individual incidents, the root causes such as fatigue rarely come to light. In fact the effects of fatigue can be as damaging as alcohol. A study by the Centre for Sleep Research in Australia, published by the T&G general union in 2000, showed that, after 18 hours awake, the performance of a driver is equivalent to having the legal maximum of alcohol in the blood. As T&G general secretary Bill Morris put it: "A tired driver can be more dangerous than a drunk one."

Driving for work

Drivers of lorries, vans, taxis, coaches, buses, emergency vehicles, company cars, construction and agricultural machinery, and motorcycle delivery workers, all drive as a core part of their work. But driving is also part of the job for maintenance workers, refuse collectors, postal workers, breakdown services, social workers and countless others.

The managing director of Awake, part of the Loughborough Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, says that some groups of workers are at greater risk of fatigue than others. Night shift workers, for example, are vulnerable, particularly after the first night of a shift, with driving home between 4am and 6am in the morning the most dangerous time. (He also says that people with sleep problems are twice as likely to have an accident at work.) The Sleep Research Centre has carried out numerous investigations into driver fatigue, and is the main source for government figures. Its evidence suggests that more truck drivers are killed at work than any other type of employee. Their union, the T&G, says the risk to lorry drivers is exacerbated by low pay in the industry forcing them to work long hours (see box).

Case studies collected by the T&G on workers who died in fatigue-related road accidents make grim reading. In one case, a lorry driver died when his flat-back truck collided head on with a box van. The tachograph revealed he had continually failed to take sufficient rest breaks and that he regularly exceeded his maximum daily driving limit. In another case a car transporter driver was asleep at the wheel when his vehicle ran into the back of stationary traffic queue on the M62, killing three occupants of a Rover Metro.

Not recognised

Given the extent of the problem, it is surprising that driver fatigue is not a more widely recognised hazard for workers. One reason is that work-related road deaths in general are dealt with differently from other workplace hazards - for example they are not reported in the Health and Safety Commission's annual round-up of statistics. In fact the government has only recently taken steps to measure work-related road incidents adequately. In 2001 the Work-related Road Safety Task Group reported that up to a third of all road traffic incidents could involve someone at work at the time. This equates to around 1,000 fatalities a year.

The TUC's own research also suggests 1,000 workers every year are killed and 12,000 seriously injured while driving for work. This means that work-related road incidents cause three times more deaths annually than agriculture, construction and other industries put together. Only asbestos is a bigger workplace killer. The TUC wants employers to have a specific responsibility for their driving workforce, and for road traffic incidents to be investigated like any other incident in the workplace. The TUC also wants employers to carry out risk assessments for driving workers, and take appropriate measures to eliminate or control the hazards. For drivers and other road users, workers who drive and those who are driven, the message is simple: fatigue kills, so working hours must be cut.

Tired train drivers

Fatigue does not simply apply to drivers on the road. Last year train drivers' union ASLEF launched its "Drive down the hours" campaign - highlighting the dangers of tiredness for drivers and calling for reduced working hours. ASLEF points out that train drivers can do 16 hours in one shift, and 60 hours in a week, which inevitably causes fatigue. The union wants train drivers' hours to be limited by law to a maximum of 42 hours in any week, an average of 35 hours each week over the course of a year, and appropriate breaks during shifts.

Training

Awake Ltd, part of the Loughborough Sleep Research Centre, is a consultancy specialising in fatigue-related risk assessments, and provides fatigue training for management and staff. Contact Awake at www.awakeltd.info or by phoning +44 (0)20 7462 7660. Research by the Loughborough Centre can be found at www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/hu/groups/sleep/index.htm.