Asked by: Pat Glass (Labour - North West Durham)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, with reference to the evaluation of the longer semi-trailer trial: annual report 2015, published in August 2016, whether the information supplied by haulage operators on minor injuries and damage to street furniture arising from longer semi-trailers has been independently verified.
Answered by John Hayes
The entire trial evaluation is being carried out by an independent consultant, Risk Solutions which collects the data, liaise with the operators and analyse the results before reporting to the Department for Transport. The annual reports produced by Risk Solutions are published by the Department without further editing. Risk Solutions maintains its independence strongly, reviews major departmental statements regarding the trial and results and challenges wording or claims strongly if they are not fully supported by the evidence.
All injuries reported by the operators, including minor/slight injuries, are checked against the national STATS19 data, which is collated from submissions by police forces. Risk Solutions has details of a very small number of incidents involving very minor injuries reported by the operator or by the injured party, but where the police did not attend and the injured party did not attend hospital. These are incidents which, had they involved standard trailers, would not have been reported or counted in any official data, but have been included in the LST trial injury statistics.
Studying incidents where there is no injury (and hence no police report) is challenging since there is no national standard process or format for recording such events. Any study of such incidents for longer semi-trailers (LSTs) requires that there also be a comparative dataset for non-injury incidents involving other long, articulated HGVs. Risk Solutions engaged with a small sample of operators to analyse their in-house data on all incidents to see whether LSTs were over or under-represented in the data. The results from that exercise are explained in the latest annual report. Risk Solutions are currently engaging with a larger sample of operators to expand this dataset and anticipate publishing those results in the next annual report.
Asked by: Pat Glass (Labour - North West Durham)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, with reference to the evaluation of the longer semi-trailer trial: annual report 2015, published in August 2016, what roads are being used by longer semi-trailers; and what the mileage is of such trailers on minor and urban roads.
Answered by John Hayes
The original trial terms of reference and operator undertaking issued in 2011 did not place a requirement on participating companies to track the exact movements of each Longer Semi Trailer (LST) or to log routes taken. When the trial started in 2012 GPS tracking was a new technology and to have placed such a tracking requirement on the operators would have been considered an unreasonable burden on the industry and would probably have excluded smaller operators from participating, limiting the coverage and value of the trial.
The expectation across the industry has always been that compared with other long articulated HGVs, LSTs would be likely to operate a greater proportion of their journeys on major roads, performing trunking duties. This is supported by the leg type use charts in the Annual Report, but is not ‘proven’.
During 2015, DfT and Risk Solutions looked into the options for studying LST routing by road types including sampling of the part of the fleet that is fitted with trailer GPS, backfitting the entire fleet (or those not currently fitted) with trailer GPS, or modelling the ‘likely’ routing of LSTs using the origin and destination data already provided in the trial data submissions. Modelling the likely route was chosen because it would effectively provide an insight into the balance of road types used by LSTs at a reasonable cost to the taxpayer, while minimising the additional burden on the industry.
After a feasibility study in late 2015, the trial data requirement was adjusted to make journey start/end postcodes a requested item for 2016-P1 (Jan-May) and mandatory thereafter. Operators have responded well to this requirement and Risk Solutions have start/end postcode data for more than 90% of all LST journeys) to date in 2016.
Asked by: Pat Glass (Labour - North West Durham)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, with reference to the evaluation of the longer semi-trailer trial; annual report 2015, published in August 2016, what independent research has been carried out on the crashes and incidents affecting longer semi-trailers that were logged in the September 2016 trial report.
Answered by John Hayes
The entire trial evaluation is being carried out by an independent consultant, Risk Solutions which collects the data, liaise with the operators and analyse the results before reporting to the Department for Transport. The annual reports produced by Risk Solutions are published by the Department without further editing. Risk Solutions maintains its independence strongly, reviews major departmental statements regarding the trial and results and challenges wording or claims strongly if they are not fully supported by the evidence.
All injuries reported by the operators, including minor/slight injuries, are checked against the national STATS19 data, which is collated from submissions by police forces. Risk Solutions has details of a very small number of incidents involving very minor injuries reported by the operator or by the injured party, but where the police did not attend and the injured party did not attend hospital. These are incidents which, had they involved standard trailers, would not have been reported or counted in any official data, but have been included in the LST trial injury statistics.
Studying incidents where there is no injury (and hence no police report) is challenging since there is no national standard process or format for recording such events. Any study of such incidents for longer semi-trailers (LSTs) requires that there also be a comparative dataset for non-injury incidents involving other long, articulated HGVs. Risk Solutions engaged with a small sample of operators to analyse their in-house data on all incidents to see whether LSTs were over or under-represented in the data. The results from that exercise are explained in the latest annual report. Risk Solutions are currently engaging with a larger sample of operators to expand this dataset and anticipate publishing those results in the next annual report.