Construction vehicle road deaths have no official body tracking them, no mandatory reporting line, and (until recently) little contractual pressure on the industry to address them. The University of Oxford is now trying to change that last part, and the deaths of two of its own employees are the reason why.
In the space of three weeks in 2022, two university staff were killed while cycling in Oxford. El Len Tham, also known as Ellen Moilanen, aged 44, died on 8 February in a collision with a lorry travelling to an aggregates facility just outside the city. Three weeks later, on 1 March, Dr Ling Felce, 35, was struck by an HGV belonging to a landscaping company at a roundabout in Oxford. Both deaths sent a shock through the university community that its sustainable transport manager, Ed Wigzell, describes as an awakening. ‘I’ve worked in travel and transport in Oxford for many years,’ he says. ‘I’ve never seen such an overwhelming feeling among the whole community that it’s just so unbelievably terrible, something has got to be done about this, we can’t carry on as normal.’
A £6bn pipeline used as leverage
The university’s response went beyond grief. With a building pipeline of more than £6bn over the next decade, Wigzell recognised the institution’s leverage as a major construction client. He became involved with the Construction Logistics and Community Safety (CLOCS) initiative, formed by Transport for London in 2012 and now operating as a national organisation. Any contractor seeking work on the university’s major programme will now be required to follow the CLOCS best practice standard.
The CLOCS standard focuses on how contractors and clients manage logistics to reduce risks to vulnerable road users: planning routes to avoid dangerous junctions, avoiding schools during peak hours, running onsite and offsite vehicle checks, and providing driver training. The initiative also functions as a forum where competing companies share information on safety practice. Among the clients signed up to the standard are HS2 and Heathrow. Major contractors including Balfour Beatty, Kier and Mace are also members.
Neil Withall, a logistics project lead at Mace and a former lorry driver, credits CLOCS with transforming vehicle procedures through training and equipment upgrades. He estimates that bringing an HGV up to the highest safety standard, with cameras, voice boxes and related measures, costs around £1,500 per vehicle. ‘The first thing some people say is, that’s going to cost us a load of money,’ he says. ‘It might, but it would also be a lot of money if you lose a contract because you’re not complying.’ His former experience behind the wheel gives his view a particular directness: ‘I wish I’d learnt about it when I was driving.’
The data gap driving construction vehicle road deaths into the dark
One of the most troubling aspects of construction vehicle road deaths is that no one is counting them systematically. No official body records the nature of the business involved in a road traffic incident, and such collisions fall outside the scope of RIDDOR regulations, under which onsite incidents must be reported to the Health and Safety Executive. For Andy Brooke, programme director of CLOCS, this absence of data is a ‘massive frustration.’
Brooke has made the point vividly at CLOCS conferences by asking contractors and clients to stand if they know how many people were killed or seriously injured on their projects in the past twelve months. Every delegate stands, because that is RIDDOR data and they hold it. He then asks them to remain standing if they can say the same for deaths and serious injuries caused by construction vehicles servicing their projects off-site. ‘Nobody ever stayed standing, not a soul,’ he says. A cement delivery lorry might knock someone over two hundred miles away from the project it is supplying, and the client will never hear about it.
Beyond the moral case, Brooke says contractors report a direct commercial benefit from tighter logistics management. Delivering to CLOCS standards produces ‘a positive impact on things like congestion, on environmental outputs and emissions,’ and saves time and money through more efficient deliveries. Wigzell’s position at the University of Oxford makes a similar point from the client side: when procurement criteria require CLOCS compliance, safety standards become a condition of winning work, not a voluntary aspiration.
Brooke’s closing argument is the simplest: ‘We all cross the road, we all walk on the pavement, cross at traffic lights, we are all vulnerable road users, so it could be us, it could be your children walking to school, your wives, your parents. You should never lose sight of that, just because it hasn’t affected you yet.’
