This week (15 – 21 November) is Road Safety Week, the UK’s biggest road safety event, organised by Brake the road safety charity. Every year, thousands of schools, businesses, organisations and communities get involved to shout out for our right to make safe and healthy journeys every day.

The theme of Road Safety Week 2021 is ROAD SAFETY HEROES, celebrating the heroic work of road safety professionals, and explaining how we can all play a part in making journeys safer for everyone.

In 2020, 1,516 people were killed on UK roads, with 1,460 deaths recorded in Britain and 56 recorded in Northern Ireland. This was a significant decline compared with the previous five years is due in part to the lockdown measures that were imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number of road deaths in the UK plateaued from 2012 to 2019 at around 1,850 deaths a year, or the equivalent of five a day, on average.

The trend relating to serious injuries is more difficult to analyse, as the method the police use to record severity has changed in recent years. When accounting for the changes in reporting the estimated number of serious injuries since 2010 has declined slightly, albeit at a slower rate than before 2010. However, the total figure is still in excess of 22,000 serious injuries a year, or the equivalent of around 60 a day, on average.

As a responsible transport logistics company Transcentral are well aware of the dangers on our roads and the role we play in ensuring everyone’s safety.  We support Road Safety Week and are committed to;

• Engage with our drivers about key road safety issues and encourage them to commit to making safe and healthy journeys.
• Include road safety in your corporate social responsibility strategy to show you care about staff, customers and local people.
• Introduce robust policies and procedures to manage work-related road risk.
• Remind drivers to think about who they share the road with and always drive at speeds appropriate to the road conditions.
• Choose routes that use the safest roads and avoid places where people live
• Monitor driver behaviour using telematics systems.
• Run targeted training for drivers that show unsafe driving behaviours.
• Investigate the cause of all collisions and near-misses.

About Brake

Brake is a road safety charity working with communities and organisations across the UK to stop the tragedy of road deaths and injuries, make streets and communities safer for everyone, and support people bereaved and seriously injured on roads. They have been working since 1995 to make a difference across the UK by:

• Supporting people affected by road death and serious injury.
• Campaigning for evidence-based policies and investments to enable everyone to have access to safe and healthy mobility.
• Working with schools and families, communities and companies to champion the cause of road safety and raise awareness of key road safety issues.
• Coordinating Road Safety Week, the UK’s biggest annual road safety campaign.
• Helping organisations that employ people who drive for work to manage work-related road risk.
• Support professionals working with road crash victims.

For more information on Brake and Road Safety week please visit their website here: https://www.brake.org.uk