The Scale of the Problem – and Why It Hides in Plain Sight

The headline data is stark. Young drivers aged 17 to 24 account for around one in five of all people killed or seriously injured on UK roads, and young men – who make up the vast majority of van drivers – are four times more likely to be killed or seriously injured than the wider driving population. These are not marginal numbers. They describe a concentrated, predictable, and therefore manageable risk.

Yet as Simon Turner explained, employers routinely fail to see it. The mental image of a young driver is a 17-year-old learner, not a 22-year-old apprentice or graduate. Because the young-driver bracket runs to 24, a large share of a company's early-career workforce falls into the highest-risk group without anyone flagging it. The risk is compounded by a transition that very few treat seriously enough: moving from a car to a van.

Mark Cartwright captured why National Highways felt a dedicated guide was needed – a gap not in whether fleet managers knew there was a risk, but in whether they knew what to do about it.

The physics genuinely change. A van has poorer visibility, larger blind spots and no rear-view mirror. It needs more room to manoeuvre. Its braking and handling differ from a car – and differ again depending on whether it is loaded or empty. The driver sits higher, which distorts their perception of speed. Different speed limits apply. And the van may lack the driver-assistance safety systems the young driver has come to rely on in their own car – the safety nets they never think about are suddenly gone.

Confidence Versus Competence: The Dangerous Gap

One of the most important ideas in Simon Turner's presentation concerned the difference between confidence and competence – and the window of danger that opens between them.

Confidence grows quickly. After a fortnight in a van, a young driver may feel they have got the hang of it. But genuine competence – the ability to read a hazard and react correctly and immediately in any situation – takes far longer to build. In the gap between the two, drivers become over-confident, stop identifying risks properly, and revert to habits from their car: higher speeds, closer following distances. This is not recklessness. It is a predictable developmental stage, made worse by the fact that young people's risk-perception and decision-making faculties are not fully formed until the mid-to-late twenties, and by circadian rhythms that leave them more fatigued on early shifts.

The practical lesson is that the highest-risk moment is not the first day – it is a few weeks in, exactly when many employers have already withdrawn support and sent the driver out solo. Any effective system has to keep supporting the driver through that window, not just through induction.

A Three-Tier Framework for Getting It Right

From the fleets they studied, Driving for Better Business distilled a clear framework of good practice built in three tiers, each building on the last.

Tier 1 is the minimum for any driver new to vans, of any age: a comprehensive vehicle induction, driver profiling and assessment, familiarisation with a driving-for-work policy, and basic telematics in the vehicle. Tier 2 adds a permit-to-drive system, a structured training programme covering vehicle handling, slow-speed manoeuvring, speed limits and safe loading, and a period paired with a mentor during which the new driver does not drive solo. Tier 3 layers on the enhanced controls aimed specifically at young drivers: extended training delivered in a distributed model, additional training elements where needed, and regular refresher training.

Mark Cartwright was candid that even the baseline is more than many businesses currently manage – while insisting it should not be the ceiling.

"Tier one's got to be the minimum and I don't think it's good enough. I think we can do better than tier one." Mark Cartwright, National Highways

A permit to drive functions like an additional, company-specific licence with a higher threshold: a driver assessment, an induction workshop, at least two days of familiarisation and training, an eyesight test, a pass-or-fail standard, and minimum entry requirements around licence tenure and penalty points – plus a defined process to revoke the permit and re-train if standards slip.

Distributed Training: The Single Most Important Lesson

If one intervention stood out, it was distributed training – and the evidence for it is compelling. Many companies run an intensive two-day induction and then send drivers out alone. Both case-study fleets proved this does not work, particularly for young drivers.

Distributed training splits learning into a series of half-day chunks delivered over several weeks. It improves retention because it avoids overload, gives drivers time to process between sessions, and, crucially, lets real-world driving between sessions surface genuine questions that make the next session more useful. It mirrors how skill is actually acquired. As Alasdair Hayman-Start put it, driving is a skill, and like any skill it takes time to develop.

Mentoring is the other half. The guidance recommends a minimum of six weeks for all new van drivers, extended up to six months for under-25s, with no solo driving during that period. But the quality of the mentor matters more than their seniority – a point Mark Cartwright was emphatic about.

"It's very easy to fall into the trap of pointing out your longest serving driver to be a mentor, or the most gregarious, loudest driver on the fleet – but they're not necessarily the safest." Mark Cartwright, National Highways

John Wilkinson reframed the mentor's role in a way that made it work culturally at Northern Powergrid: mentors are not instructors and are not expected to teach someone to drive. They are there to work as a team, to be the eyes and ears, and to offer guidance. That framing lowered resistance and made experienced drivers willing to take part – and, as Simon Turner noted, offered a valuable form of career development for drivers a business wants to retain.

The Proof: From Three Collisions a Month to Zero

The case studies are what elevate this discussion from sensible theory to demonstrated result.

At SP Electricity North West, apprentices had been averaging three collisions a month. The fleet introduced distributed training across four weekly half-day sessions, brought in professional trainers for classroom workshops targeting their specific concerns including phone distraction, had experts explain the science of cognitive development, and invited the parents of young collision victims to speak directly to their apprentices. Eleven months later, when the case study was written, their apprentices had not been involved in a single collision – preventing an estimated 33 collisions that would otherwise likely have occurred.

1 in 5	Of all UK road deaths and serious injuries involve a young driver aged 17–24
4×	Young male drivers' heightened likelihood of being killed or seriously injured
3 a month → 0	SP Electricity North West apprentice collisions before and after distributed training
~33	Collisions estimated to have been prevented in 11 months at one fleet
22%	Reduction in vehicle incidents at Electricity North West in year one – against a 15% target
10%	Insurance premium reduction achieved after 12 months of the programme

Northern Powergrid moved all new van-driver training to a distributed six-week model with a mentor, extending mentoring to six months for young drivers. To qualify for a permit to drive, young drivers must have held a full licence for two years, have fewer than seven penalty points, and have no convictions for mobile-phone use or drink- or drug-driving, and all must complete a slow-speed manoeuvring course. The result was improved telematics scores across the business and a further reduction in collisions for an already well-run fleet. At SP Electricity North West, the programme delivered a 22% reduction in vehicle incidents in its first year against a 15% target, alongside a 10% cut in insurance premiums.

Telematics: A Friend in the Cab, Not a Foe

Telematics ran through the whole discussion – not as surveillance, but as the evidence base that makes coaching meaningful. As Simon Turner noted, coaching conversations must be built on real data, or they become subjective and far less effective.

Dan Ward, whose company insures around 30,000 young drivers aged 17 to 24, was clear that the device itself is almost beside the point; what changes behaviour is the human conversation the data enables. His firm fits a telematics box to every young-driver policy without exception, and the resulting premium reductions can run to 30–40% over the year. But he was equally clear that the feedback has to be transparent and, critically, positive as well as corrective – because what is recognised gets repeated.

John Wilkinson articulated the cultural principle that makes telematics and forward-facing cameras acceptable to drivers rather than resented.

"It's so important that we identify that the telematics and forward-facing cameras, at a minimum, are a friend in the cab, they are not the foe." John Wilkinson, Northern Powergrid

Time and again, he noted, the footage has shown that his drivers were doing the right thing – and the business supports them on that basis. The data is not gathered only at management level; it is shared at the coal face, where local managers can have the conversations that actually improve driving. Both Dan Ward and Alasdair Hayman-Start also made a forward-looking point ARRM members should note: there is no industry standard for what telematics even measures, and the frontier worth pushing towards is not just speed and location but fatigue and distraction – the factors most relevant to young drivers.

Making the Business Case – and the Wider Policy Picture

Every intervention described carries operational cost and disruption. Both fleet leaders were pressed on how to justify it internally, and their answers converged.

Alasdair Hayman-Start stressed executive buy-in from the outset: line up key stakeholders behind the benefits and outcomes, set SMART targets, agree the metrics, and report progress to the board monthly so the business benefit is visible and evidenced. John Wilkinson added the other essential thread – taking first-line managers on the journey so the programme is done with drivers, not to them. His phrase for it was simple: the golden thread to success is communication. The learning-review culture that both described – investigating every collision and near miss not to apportion blame but to prevent the next one – is what turns data into sustained improvement.

This connects directly to the Road Safety Strategy. The strategy's Safe System framework and its emphasis on safer road users, technology and data map almost exactly onto what these fleets have done: structured graduated exposure, telematics-led coaching, and a culture of learning from near misses. The policy backdrop is shifting too – Northern Ireland is introducing graduated driver licensing from October, and calls continue for England and Wales to follow. But as the webinar's framing made plain, employers do not need to wait for legislation. The tools exist now, they are proven, and they are within reach of any fleet willing to treat the van transition as the significant risk it genuinely is.

The Opportunity for ARRM Members

The most striking thing about this discussion is how solvable the problem turns out to be. A workforce group over-represented in the most serious collisions, handed vehicles they are not prepared for – and yet fleets applying a structured, driver-focused, data-informed approach have driven their collision rates to zero and cut both incidents and insurance costs at the same time.

For ARRM members in fleet, health-and-safety, compliance and people-development roles, the five core actions are clear: implement a permit-to-drive system with real entry requirements and a route to revoke it; provide comprehensive vehicle training; deliver it in distributed half-day modules over four to six weeks; use telematics data as the basis for coaching and reward improvement; and establish a mentoring system with no solo driving during the period. None of it requires new legislation. All of it saves money, and some of it saves lives.

The Driving for Better Business guide to managing young and inexperienced van drivers is available free, and the case-study fleets have shown what good looks like. The question for every employer with an apprentice about to be handed a set of van keys is simply whether they will treat that moment as a routine step – or as the foreseeable risk it truly is.