Richard Schooling’s Blog: May

29 May 2007: Now we are 10

Not many people get to celebrate two 10th birthdays in a lifetime but this week I got my chance when Alphabet reached its 10-year milestone. As one of three people who have been with Alphabet since day one, it was a big moment for me as well as the company.

Everyone at Alphabet GB – there are now more than 110 of us (and nearly 680 worldwide) – had a slice of cake and a glass of champagne.

Of course, you can’t have a 10th anniversary without looking back over the preceding decade. And you can’t look back over the last 10 years in the fleet industry without noticing some big changes.

For one thing, 10 years ago there were almost a third more company car drivers than there are now. CO2 meant someone who was one rank down from a commanding officer. A carbon footprint was something you’d find on the floor of a fire station. Perhaps I’d better stop there before this entry turns into one of those twee lists of things that aren’t how they used to be – the sort you find on souvenir tea towels.

Anniversaries of business start-ups are often also the cue for someone to recall how it all began: “You’d never believe it, but we started in a single room, with no furniture or computers: just a phone, a blank sheet of paper and a vision.” Actually, all that really was true at Alphabet – at least for a couple of days – although our vision is still as strong as ever.

So in one sense this week was a celebration both of how far we’ve come and of what we’ve managed to hang on to. Although only a handful of our team go all the way back to the very beginning, many people at Alphabet have been with us for eight, nine or almost 10 years. As have some long-standing customers, such as the NSPCC. It’s a record of continuity that I think we’re right to value very highly.

Time doesn’t stand still, though. Two days after the anniversary, the business is back to looking forward and I’m finishing this entry in a hotel room in Germany between meetings.

Mit freundlichen Grussen / Best regards

Richard

21 May 2007: Holy Smoke

Fresh signs of confusion over the impending smoking ban this week, with the story about churches being made to confront visitors with prominent no-smoking signs at the point of entry; just like businesses, boozers and buses.

You’d imagine that, when they were making up the rules, someone at Smoke-free Central might have thought, “Hmm. Church doors. No-smoking signs. Not a good look.”

(They might also have stopped to question whether a smoke-free car needs to wear a clunking 3-inch-wide no-smoking sticker on its dash when a couple of discrete, coin-size window stickers by the door locks would be twice as tasteful and just as effective. But, alas, no).

In the churches’ case, enforcement officers in Southwark, London, apparently told a parish priest they’d close his church after 1 July if he didn’t put up approved signage. Elsewhere in the borough, a different enforcement officer from the same council assured another vicar that his church wouldn’t need signs if he could get an aged parishioner to testify that no-one had ever smoked in his church!

Legally, I believe they’re both wrong – but that’s not the point. Nearly all these bridges have already been crossed: there’s simply no need for this kind of muddle.

In Scotland, they’ve had a year’s smoking ban experience and it’s extensively incorporated into the official www.clearingtheairscotland.com website, in the form of best practice advice for implementation and enforcement.

The English ban site, by contrast, is a messy case of putting form before function. It isn’t good at clear explanations and seems happy to ignore others’ experience.

But then who is in charge of implementing and communicating the ban? The NHS. And when have medics ever had a reputation for explaining things clearly or listening to each other?

The way things are going, the first thing that many English fleets will want after 1 July is a second opinion.

11 May 2007: Wiz bang

Whitehall’s unexpected strike at the inoffensive-looking G-wiz electric runabout this week looked monstrously unfair at first. But it highlighted the fact that there are few, if any, shortcuts on the road to greener transport.

Transport mandarins say the G-wiz, which is technically a battery-powered, four-wheeled bicycle, isn’t nearly as safe in a crash as the “real” cars it resembles.

They’re asking Brussels effectively to outlaw these lightweight vehicles; essentially because they look too much like a conventional, safer mode of transport (something that was never a problem for the laughable but legal Sinclair C5).

That’s a shame. In the long run, low-cost, low-emission, lightly-constructed cars will undoubtedly play a part in making our city centres cleaner and more pleasant.

On the other hand, new car buyers are now conditioned to expect NCAP-rated safety levels, with air bags and crumple zones. The DfT has a point when it says that buyers mightn’t understand that the G-wiz offers none of these, and only a fraction of the protection of a real car.

Indeed, the national media obligingly ran stories about driving the G-Wiz in traffic; making the experience sound something like piloting a hen’s egg through a high-speed potato-sorting machine.

I’m sure it wasn’t quite that bad but the way ahead, technologically, must surely be to continue on our present path of producing progressively greener conventional cars: cars that fleets can happily and safely give to their drivers.

To be fair to the G-wiz, its importers claim that no-one has been killed or seriously injured in one in more than two million miles of use to date.

So perhaps it was no coincidence that the G-wiz was picked-on very publicly just a day before the DfT announced the UK’s total road injury toll for 2006 – which it did right in the middle of media frenzy surrounding the Prime Minister’s formal departure speech.

Definitely a case of trying to cloud the issue while also choosing a good day to bury bad news, you might think (although the 285,000 casualties last year were slightly fewer than in previous years).

Even so, if the G-wiz story was just a smokescreen, it was very green-minded of the Department to think of using a ‘zero-emission’ vehicle to produce it!

3 May 2007: Last chance for corporate killing bill

It now looks as if only a miracle can save the beleaguered corporate manslaughter bill from itself being killed off in a few weeks’ time.

Unless the Lords and Commons can work out a last-ditch compromise over prisons and psychiatric hospitals, the bill’s time will finally run out when Parliament rises in July.

Since the bill is a “hangover” from the previous session of Parliament, it cannot have any more chances. Like the eponymous Godot in Samuel Becket’s play, the reformed law on corporate killing could reach the final curtain without seeing the light of day.

Oddly enough, the proposed law has probably achieved almost as much by simply looming in the background for almost a decade as it might do if it finally becomes law.

For a start, although the new law would be relatively toothless compared with workplace safety legislation, the phrase ‘corporate killing’ has a much more draconian ring to it than ‘health and safety’. Rightly or wrongly, it is often assumed that the penalties for the new offence would also be commensurately more severe.

In fact, the toughest sentence for corporate manslaughter would be a fine (albeit a huge one) and a court order compelling the convicted company to advertise its guilt to the world at its own expense. No directors or managers would be jailed or disciplined under this law – although of course they can be under the health and safety at work act.

Several attempts have been made to insert a clause in the Bill making bad or negligent bosses “secondarily liable” for fatal failures of management but none has succeeded.

Nevertheless, I think that two factors have allowed this Bill to make an impact on fleet safety without even becoming law.

Firstly, the HSE published its guide to managing at-work road safety shortly before the corporate manslaughter Bill began its passage through Parliament. Secondly, the Bill itself made corporate attitudes towards obeying safety laws and guidelines a key consideration for juries to weigh up.

The HSE road safety guidelines would therefore be crucial in a prosecution arising from a fatal accident involving a working driver.

But an organisation that (a) endeavoured to comply with the guidelines and (b) maintained robust audit trails of its occupational road safety activities would be well-placed to defend itself against a prosecution for corporate manslaughter.

It’s not quite a get-out-of-jail-free card but, considering how dangerous a workplace Britain’s roads are, one can see that employers would be mad not to take it.

Nevertheless, as Alphabet’s research for our report, Risk and Reward 2007, demonstrates, there is still a very long way to go: for instance we found that 60% of company car drivers and fully three-quarters of opt-out drivers were not asked to sign their acknowledgement of company road safety policies. If prosecuted, their employer’s defence might therefore fall at the first hurdle.

But thanks to the corporate killing Bill, road risk is no longer quite the Cinderella of health and safety that it often used to be, even in otherwise safety conscious organisations.

It’s still too early to be writing an obituary for the Corporate Manslaughter (England) and Corporate Killing (Scotland) Bill, since the Home Office might just pull it off.

If the Bill doesn’t make it, the big question is what will happen next. Who’s to say whether, under a new Prime Minister, a different Bill won’t come back in the next Parliament with a longer reach and sharper teeth?

We shall have to wait and see.