Cynthia Barlow OBE

My daughter was run over and killed by a left-turning concrete mixer lorry while she was cycling to work in the City of London. I was at work when the police came to tell me that she was dead. She was 26. She had a first degree, a Master’s degree and a job with one of the big City firms, where she met her boyfriend. Her future was just beginning and then suddenly she didn’t exist anymore. 

I couldn’t believe it, and nobody would tell me anything. This was in the days before Police Family Liaison Officers existed, and victims had no rights, so I had no information about what had happened and what the legal response would be.

I only knew what was on the police notice at the site asking for witnesses, which said the incident involved an orange cement mixer. My daughter was a careful cyclist, on a familiar daily route to work, so what had happened made no sense to me and I decided I would have to do my own investigation.

I started going to meetings about road crashes, corporate accountability, legal systems connected to corporate manslaughter and doing research into all relevant areas of knowledge.

I came to realise that it was disproportionately HGV lorries, particularly construction industry vehicles, that were involved in fatal road crashes and decided to buy shares in the company so that I could go to their AGM and talk about what needed to be done about this.

The company (then RMC, now CEMEX) offered to work with me. We started with driver training and made a video which was used for a long time.

Then one day, RoadPeace contacted me and said that they had heard from a cyclist who had been run over and seriously injured by a concrete mixer lorry and asked if I could help her.

The phone number they gave me was in Shropshire so I assumed what had happened to her had happened in Shropshire. It hadn’t, she had been cycling to work in the City of London and was run over by a left-turning lorry, yards away from where my daughter was killed, the same manoeuvre, same time of day.

I contacted the person I worked with at CEMEX to ask him what he knew about this. He told me that it was the same lorry that had been involved in my daughter’s death, although not the same driver, but the same vehicle.

So, we began working on lorry design and safety technology. This was a significant issue across the industry and other companies also became involved. Huge changes have happened since then, and there is now an official CLOCS (Construction Logistics and Community Safety) group. It focuses on all aspects of transport in the construction industry and what needs to be done to improve safety in all areas, the driver, the vehicle, safer access to sites, training for staff at all levels, to ensure that safety becomes a priority and gets the attention it deserves.

A piece of academic research into the cost of sorting out the consequences of road crashes showed that the cost of each fatal collision including medical expenditure, police costs, legal costs, property damage and other costs, is on average over £2 million.

Wouldn’t it make more sense to spend £2 million on the prevention of crashes?