FORS is the Yin and CLOCS is the Yang - LAPV Future Fleet Forum
Last week brought me to Stoneleigh Park in order to take part in the Local Authority Plant and Vehicles (LAPV) Future Fleet Forum. Cycle Alert was lucky enough to exhibit on the day, alongside Brigade Electronics and our partner, RAM mounts, as one of the tech providers enabling LAPV vehicles to increase the levels of safety and efficacy on their vehicles. Although an exhibitor in the first capacity, I was eager to listen in on the morning talks featuring TfL’s Hannah White on FORS and CLOCS standards and safety statistics, plus courageous Kate Cairns of See Me Save Me, who filled the room with emotion as she picked apart the statistics to reveal that behind the percentiles are real people, real families, real tragedies. It made a real difference to have Kate there, as the delegate mood seemed to change - it made the made difference between a day of apathetic, lethargic lessons in tick-box exercises, to actively galvanising a culture of safety among the industry. It is fair to say the whole room was moved.
This day will forever be remembered by me as the day I learned what CLOCS actually was; “I know what CLOCS is!!!” I exclaimed to my boss, much to his horror at my initial ignorance. Yes, I’ve always known what it stood for and what it aims to do, but up until now I couldn’t see what it did, past regurgitating all of what TfL had previously said in its FORS recommendations, with a pretty website and new marketing literature that has always looked far too similar to our own Cycle Alert’s….(but that’s another story)……
This is not to belittle the work that CLOCS do/have done - but it’s challenging to embrace two avenues of rhetoric saying the exact same thing, talking about workstreams one, two and three etc etc and all the while people - not numbers or percentages or decimal points - ACTUAL PEOPLE - are having their lives tragically and needlessly cut short because of HGVs on our roads.
I can’t be the only person who has felt like this, or been confused by the difference between FORS and CLOCS, at the difference between what FORS was doing and what CLOCS was doing - TfL tried to explain it at the forum by saying, “FORS is the yin and CLOCS is the yang” (yeh, right now I get it….) so at the risk of sounding benighted, I’ll explain to those, like me, who aren’t as clued up as TfL on their yin-yang… 🙂
Back in 2009 Crossrail were already recognising that the laws in place on HGV vehicle safety just weren’t good enough for purpose. They came up with their own set of standards, over and above what was required of vehicles by law, for contractors tendering to work on their Crossrail sites. Here was a commercial enterprise setting the bar to help improve vulnerable road users’ safety around Heavy Goods Vehicles; suddenly vehicles were being turned away from their worksites if they didn’t have fresnal lenses, side-guards and sensors. Work related road risk (WRRR) standards were born.
Hot on their tails were Transport for London (TfL) who came up with the Fleet Operator Recognitions Scheme (FORS) in order to identify those contractors’ whose vehicles reached TfL’s desired ‘over-and-above the law’ safety specifications in order to work on their sites, and the Mineral Products Association (MPA) who introduced its own HGV vehicle safety doctrine in 2012.
And so, in 2013, with all these contractors - Crossrail, TfL, MPA and more - producing their own set set of standards, each varying ever so slightly but all aiming to achieve the same thing - Transport for London facilitated an initiative to work alongside all these contractors to produce one set of safety standards, to which all contractors could be encouraged to adhere to. Introducing….CLOCS.
Common knowledge though this may be to many readers, I was surprised that when the Forum were asked, “Who here has heard of FORS?” only half the room raised their hands. Unexpected really, since FORS’ standards have - in 2015 - been taken nationwide, by appointment of AECOM and it’s so recognised in London as a safety standard.
As much as the Forum helped provide me with a definitive “FORS and CLOCS answer” it also threw up some unanswered questions for me. Technology. It’s not surprising really, is it, we at Cycle Alert talk about it a lot but whilst different types of vehicle technology are recommended - sold, even under the FORS associate brand - there is no reference to it on the Safer Lorry Scheme (due to come into full effect September 1st). Why is that?
If CLOCS - the product of 6 years worth of industry-led work into vulnerable road user safety and work related road risk - has collectively decided that HGVs should be fitted with technologies to reduce blind-spots, why has that not been included under the mandates of the Safer Lorry Scheme?
Perhaps because CLOCS do not have a definitive guide on what technologies are effective enough to be mandated. But why is THAT? If all the good work that the collective CLOCS has achieved thus far, points towards to necessitation of vehicle technology (of some description), shouldn’t we be conducting a conclusive investigation into what those technologies should be? At the moment, there is nothing - no standardisation, no investigation. And as long as that is the case, there is a huge piece of the jigsaw missing in terms of making our HGVs safer; FORS and CLOCS are still in a state of disharmony….and they’re messing up my Qi. 🙂
(nb: For the purpose of this blog ‘yin yang’ was taken as a direct quote from TfL but is not actually used according to its real conditions; for more information on the meaning/usage of yin-yang please see here)
