Show notes: Tyre Safety - 35,000 tyre incidents a year, the tip of the iceberg Stuart Lovatt, Chairman, TyreSafe October is National Tyre Safety Month, organised by the charity TyreSafe. I’m joined for this episode by Stuart Lovatt – the new Chairman of TyreSafe – to talk about why fleet operators should get involved with this year’s campaign. https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/tyre-safety-35000-tyre-incidents-a-year-the-tip-of-the-iceberg/   Useful links TyreSafehttps://tyresafe.org/  Transcript Simon: October is National Tyre Safety Month, organised by the charity TyreSafe. I’m joined for this episode by Stuart Lovatt – the new Chairman of TyreSafe – to talk about why fleet operators should get involved with this year’s campaign. Hi Stuart and welcome to the podcast. Congratulations on your new appointment. We’ve known each other many years from your previous role as Strategic Road Safety Lead at National Highways – could you start with a brief introduction to TyreSafe for listeners who maybe aren’t familiar with it? Stuart: Yes of course – my own experience in working with TyreSafe went back to 2006 at the Prince Michael of Kent Road safety Awards, at that time I started to understand what TyreSafe was, prior to them becoming a registered road safety charity. I started to understand more and more about the importance of tyres and what that means for trying to reduce the number of incidents on the network. My role within in National Highways – we could be looking at something like 35,000 tyre related incidents on the strategic road network, and that network is only 3.5% of roads within the country, so you can extrapolate that and think of how many incidents mut be happening each year. To me the importance of safer tyres became an increasing concern that more needed to be done in this field, so I’m pleased to say that something like 16 years I’ve been working on tyre safety and so upon my retirement form National Highways it was very kind of TyreSafe to offer me the Chair of the organisation to carry on the work I was hoping to do when I was in National Highways. Simon: 35,000 tyre incidents a year is a staggering amount – and that leads onto my first question - DfBB often puts out information talking about the need for regular vehicle checks because the DVSA statistics show really big failure rates for MOTs on both cars and vans. The number that fail an MOT at the first attempt is a staggering amount. How big a problem is tyre safety for company vehicles? Stuart: I think it would be fair to say that safety of tyres and the importance within keeping your vehicle on the road is probably not very well understood and that’s not just people who are driving on business – it’s generally that people don’t understand the importance. We talk about business tyre safety – these 4 things that are actually touching the road ( or two tings if you’re on a 2 wheeler) and it’s that piece of machinery, a very complex piece of machinery, it’s that which can actually help you to stop if something unexpected happens on the journey. It’s not just drivers on business – it’s a general campaign that I think what business can do and from our previous work with Driving for Better Business, it’s important we continue to raise awareness as you said, your daily checks before you set off, a more detailed weekly and monthly check - its continuously reminding the drivers, the fleet managers, the depot mangers about the importance of doing these checks and that’s why in Tyresafe we have the acronym to ACT upon your tyres – air, condition and tread - because anyone of those can lead to a failure which can have not only consequences around the actual journey but potentially much more serious consequences. Simon: Yes, air, condition and tread is a very good acronym and it forms the basis for a lot of your campaigns, but one of the good things I think about Tyresafe, is the messages are all backed up by hard evidence and research