A NEW road safety programme pioneered in Wiltshire and aimed at the military has been shown to top brass in Whitehall and is going national.

Survive the Drive was born out of the Safe Drive Stay Alive scheme roadshow that used shock tactics and was seen by thousands of schoolchildren in Swindon and Wiltshire, as well as soldiers at RAF Lyneham.

Developed by Wiltshire Fire Service with the Ministry of Defence and others, it was presented to chiefs at Army HQ, Naval Command in Portsmouth and the MOD at Abbey Wood in Bristol. Senior RAF officers will be seeing it next month.

Ian Hopkins, prevention delivery manager for the fire service said: “We have been taking our Safe Drive Stay Alive roadshow to local military bases for the past ten years, but Survive the Drive is designed specifically for its audience and is now being rolled out across the country.

We use the strapline ‘tomorrow is decided today’ as these are people who can relate to the impact of a split-second decision. We want them to recognise the parallels between the decisions they make while operational, and those they make at home when driving, and to adjust their actions accordingly.”

Presentations held at Tidworth before Christmas were recorded, and all MOD military bases will use Survive the Drive as part of their training programmes. Where local speakers aren’t available, the filmed show will be used instead.

Ian said: “It is a massive honour for our scheme to be adopted at a national level like this and we are very grateful to everyone involved in getting us to this stage. We know from the feedback that we’ve received from past military interventions that the programme does work, so hopefully it will play its part in bringing down the number of military personnel killed or seriously injured while driving.”

Statistics show that vehicle-related collisions are the second largest cause of non-operational fatalities and injuries across the Ministry of Defence, only exceeded by training incidents.

Survive the Drive, is part-funded by a grant from the Armed Forces Covenant Fund and includes powerful testimonies from a police officer, a paramedic and a firefighter who have had to deal with fatal crashes, someone who has caused a crash, a victim and someone who has lost a family member as a result of a crash.