May the FORS be with you
Vans, trucks, cars and even cargo bike fleets can improve safety and cut costs with help from FORS
If you have heard of the Fleet Operator Recognition Scheme (FORS) you might have two thoughts about it; firstly, that it is designed for truck operators and secondly that the scheme only operates in London, where it originated. If so, you would be wrong on both counts.
42% of FORS Operators have vans in their accredited fleet and 11% of FORS Operators are solely van fleets. So far this year, FORS has seen a 10% increase in operators who only run vans, compared with 2023. While the scheme started in London it is gradually spreading across the country and even internationally now.
So, what’s it all about and why should you be interested?
“The core pillar of FORS is to improve road safety and then obviously if you're going to be doing that, improving best practice, we’re going to see improving behaviours because a lot of things are driver-centric,” says FORS concession director Geraint Davies. “So if we’re going to be improving road safety we’re going to have a correlated reduction in collisions, an improving picture with insurance and of course the fuel bill.”
FORS is an accreditation scheme designed to promote best practice among the widest range of transport fleets. The schemes are equally applicable to cars, vans, minibuses, trucks, buses and coaches as well as smaller goods vehicles such as cargo bikes. FORS has recently published its latest Standard, Standard 7, which will be applicable from January 2025 and brings more focus on decarbonisation. It provides a fully comprehensive guide to what is needed to achieve accreditation.
Alongside this, one of the latest additions to the training course is FORS Owner Van Driver Accreditation. Since van numbers on our roads have grown greatly following Covid, FORS' plan was to make its schemes accessible and relevant to van owner drivers such as couriers.
“When we discuss vans with our colleagues in National Highways for example, or Driving for Better Business, they will reference the fact that a large number of the incidents on the strategic road network involve vans of all descriptions,” says Davies.
For van operators, the accreditation scheme begins with bronze, with progression to silver and gold, should operators wish to develop their accreditation further. It’s a structure that is shared with all other vehicle categories.
“So if we’re going to be improving road safety we’re going to have a correlated reduction in collisions, an improving picture with insurance and of course the fuel bill”
FORS concession director, Geraint Davies
“It’s to make operators safer, smarter and greener, so there’s a framework underneath FORS bronze,” says Davies. “For the larger vehicles, you've got your own licence undertaking and FORS goes beyond that obviously, but that is lacking in the smaller vehicle types. So, because you haven’t got that regulatory framework, what we are seeing now is people wanting FORS, even in the cargo bikes sector, as a tangible framework that can be used for best practice as well as safety, not just road safety but safety in general, Health and Safety policies and risk assessments and things like that, including things that people should have in place and when clients are operators for things as well. I have said to operators before, forget FORS for a minute, these are things that you should have in place for the DVSA, the HSE, so it gives it that framework if something does go wrong.
“What we’ve got to look at with Professional Safe Driving is that it’s not a nice-to-have but it’s a must-have, and you don’t want it to be ‘I wish I had’, post event.”
FORS' latest Professional Safe Driving is delivered as two half-day driver training modules.
Davies used the predecessor to Professional Safe Driving, a training course called Safe Urban Driving, in his previous job as a fleet manager and saw a clear return on investment with it. He was also responsible for buying insurance for the fleet. “I could see a direct correlation: as training increased, claims experience went down. Loss ratio improved as well, so that we had a reduction in insurance premiums because the drivers were much more aware of what was going on around them.”