Qualifying as a Solicitor: Brian Evans and Emma Harrison #2.

[00:00:05 – 00:00:18] Amanda: This is the Legal Lounge from Lanyon Bowdler Solicitors, where you’ll hear about many aspects of law in England and Wales with special guests, industry experts and local charities. Here’s your host, Amanda Jones.


[00:00:18 – 00:00:53] Voiceover Person: Hello and welcome to the Legal Lounge where we now release new episodes every Monday. If you haven’t heard previous shows there’s plenty of content for you if you’re going through a divorce, want to know more about claiming for injuries or you’re training to be a lawyer. You can listen to these shows on your favourite podcast app and get more information by visiting lblaw.co.uk forward slash knowledge. In this hard-hitting podcast, crew commander Paul Harper of West Midlands Fire Service talks with Debbie Humphreys about the young driver’s safety. Safety evenings now run as road safe ready that he has initiated following the trauma of attending an accident where his son was seriously injured.


[00:00:53 – 00:01:33] Jon: Hi, Paul. Thank you for joining me today. We have known each other for a number of years. We lived fairly close to each other in our families. Well, kids are a similar age, so our paths have crossed a few times. And probably because of that, I became aware of the accident, the tragic accident that impacted your family and the thing that you then started in terms of trying to improve road safety. safety for young drivers in the area in your role really as a firefighter and as a dad so could you perhaps take us back to where this all started and why you began to do the initiative that you did


[00:01:32 – 00:04:13] Adam: I was on duty on the 15th of December 2023 just after midnight and the bells went down at the station and it came through as RTC. and the address was about 150 meters from where i live and i was trying to register where ben was that evening i knew he got out for a christmas meal from work but then i started thinking where he was and thought okay he’s not driving he’s not driving and i thought oh his friend’s driving so we went to the address i was driving the fire response at the time we got about halfway there and control came on the radio and control when they talked to you they’re very flat line voices very calm but there’s something different about it It’s about the way they reacted is very different and I’ve started picking up on that. We’ve got like a long-winded message in two halves. So I looked at my boss at the time and I went, what the is going on? I was very stressed. I went, what is going on? And he paused a bit and went back on the radio asking to repeat the second half of the message. They repeated the second half of the message and a lot of it. We go to these jobs, I’ve been in 23 years now and they were sort of saying, we just go along to help Brierley Hills crew out. there’s two males have extricated the vehicle and the ambulance are in attendance so again i was thinking why are we going we don’t need to be there if all the resources there they don’t need our help and that we got two-thirds of the way there and the phone rang it was probably a little truck over the attendance there and they pass a message on i looked over at my boss and i’ll laugh now about it and i joke and i say your poker face was terrible that evening because he paused for the longest pause and he just said i said what what do they want and they were just seeing if they got the other half of that message so I knew there was something wrong on the way there so I arrived on the scene put the handbrake on my boss went it’s Ben it’s your son and I just was like where is he straight to the ambulance got in the back of the ambulance there was a lad on the bench at the side and I just saw this person that’s the only way I can describe him a person that I didn’t know on a stretcher in front of me absolutely smashed to pieces there’s glass there’s blood there was airbag dust mud from the road all sorts and he lies the lad was apologizing to me he hadn’t got a mark on him he was the driver and then i heard the voice go dad really like crumbled voice and i realized it was ben and that was the worst night of my career having as a father so it all happened that night he rolled the car he come around the bend what was a 30 mile an hour speed limit into the bend you’d probably go a little bit slower the police estimated he was doing about 70 mile an hour the car rolled several times and then Hit a lamppost about eight feet in the air and snapped it in half and it came to rest and obviously Ben received all the injuries and the lad had no injuries


[00:04:12 – 00:04:13] Jon: Hmm.


[00:04:12 – 00:04:37] Adam: so from that point on I decided I needed time to process I had to have therapy myself and counselling and since that has gone on 18 months down the line then finally after about 20 meltdowns got the help he needed and he’s now had counselling sessions so from that I uh At times process 18 months or so and started doing these young drivers road safety evenings


[00:04:36 – 00:04:41] Jon: And the lad who was driving on the night, was he a relatively new driver?


[00:04:40 – 00:04:45] Adam: Yeah, he’d had his black box removed eight days previously as it turned out


[00:04:44 – 00:04:45] Jon: Okay.


[00:04:44 – 00:05:01] Adam: So he was quite new to driving and we believe that the way he came down the road He obviously had the brakes being inexperienced I think the ABS had come on on off He got up the curb up the grass verge and just completely lost it that had obviously going way too fast as well for conditions on the road.


[00:05:00 – 00:05:16] Jon: And kind of in the role that you have and being called out on these jobs quite frequently, was this something that you’d started to see an increase in numbers of young people in cars with numbers of passengers in them? Was this something that you’d started to see more and more of?


[00:05:15 – 00:05:49] Adam: Yeah, the more I concentrated my efforts into that area, it just seemed to be like a weekly occurrence and through social media and other platforms. and then when i started advertising these events i got a lot more responses from different people from different families putting forward and there was a lot in the press even before ben’s crash there was quite a few accidents locally in the community area i’m from i have noticed there was several high profile ones there’s one in wales where four children well four teenagers died so yeah i have noticed there still seems a massive increase at the moment as well


[00:05:48 – 00:06:52] Jon: What really affected me was And I know that you’ve spoken about it. We’ll talk about the events that you run because me and my son came along to one of them. Was in the role that you have and the role that I have as a solicitor dealing with these types of accidents, you get quite desensitized to them. So it’s kind of day to day, the thing that you do, the thing that I do every day is see photographs and injuries and talk to people who’ve been involved in accidents, but trying to get my kids to understand. The enormity of having their music really loud, having more than one or two people in the car with them is quite a difficult thing to get them to understand. They pass their test, you know, they’ve got this freedom, you know, you’re excited for them, they want to have this opportunity to be independent, but at the same time you see, as I do, the impact of high speed and vehicle collisions. and the massive impact this has not just on the people who are in the car but the ripple effect for their families as well.


[00:06:51 – 00:07:19] Adam: Yeah, huge, absolutely huge. We talk about the ripple effect, as you know, on the evening. We show them videos from a paramedic point of view as well, not just from what could happen to yourself showing how it affects and how it affects us, you know. I’ve been in 23 years. People think, oh, you’re just like a robot. You’re used to going to it. We see and hear things which you never want to see or hear. So we see that side of it and we wish they could see through our eyes the effects of what could happen to them.


[00:07:18 – 00:08:16] Jon: I mean, I first started to see you advertising stuff on social media for these events and what I became really aware of was how quickly they got booked up. The feedback that you were getting from the sessions that had already been run were really positive and you were kind of opening them up, not just to young adults, I think the age range of like 17 to 22, 24, but their families as well, and also like local driving instructors as well, so that they could impress on their students how something like this really does make you think about your behaviour and ultimately improves your driving, because once you pass that test, I always think that that’s when you actually start to learn to drive when you’re on your own. as opposed to having someone sitting next to you. So the sessions that you initially started were at your station, is that right in Dudley?


[00:08:15 – 00:08:17] Adam: That’s right,


[00:08:16 – 00:08:17] Jon: Yeah.


[00:08:16 – 00:08:17] Adam: yeah.


[00:08:16 – 00:08:36] Jon: Do you want to tell me a little bit about how they’re structured and the kind of things that you get people to participate in so that they can have those experiences of what it’s like to either be driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs and you also Give them some VR experiences too, don’t you?


[00:08:35 – 00:11:34] Adam: Yeah that’s right so we start the evening off with introductions and then we tend to split the group because they’re all big groups in half so we’ll keep half in the lecture in the classroom and send half out to do the fun bit the go-karts because as much as it’s a very serious evening we do want to break the ice and make it more fun interactive so it keeps the interest but there’s a serious side to the go-karts we’ve got these goggles which we call beer goggles it doesn’t give you 100% accuracy of drink driving but it just sort of shows how it takes some of the senses away when you’re trying to steer a car and be in control of a car so we do that and we do a couple of little exercises wearing the beer goggles as well and then the other group stop in the classroom with myself and we give them the vr goggles and we show them an incident what happened about 12 years ago in leicester um of an rtc on a rural road which is where predominantly a lot of 17 to 24 year olds have fatal accidents because of windy roads dirt on the road high speed trees so we show them that video as well which is quite hard hitting after that we get them all back into the classroom and then we do the proper presentation we show them a lot of hard hitting videos we did have a lot of pushback including from our own prevention team saying oh it’s scientifically proven that these hard hitting don’t have a long-term effect however we’ve gone through all the councils it has to and all the governing bodies they came back with advice to say to tone it down a little bit however our organization have seen all the feedback that we’ve had on facebook and decided to keep it as it is we’re not there to beat them with a stick and to say oh scare them this is going to happen to you it’s just about trying to change behaviors a lot of you You just spoke about it’s not just about the 17 to 24 year olds, the adults come along and we do a little test where we show them. using a mobile phone and we literally put a simple sentence on the screen and we asked them all to get the stopwatches out on the mobile phones read the sentence and then press stop and on average this sentence takes about four seconds to read and we ask everybody in the room including the firefighters to show their hands if anybody’s used a mobile phone to either send or receive messages and be completely honest and we’ve all done it everybody’s done it when we show them the the sentence they read it a presto afterwards we ask them the time is it always the four second mark and then we show them the actual distance they’ve traveled and in effect we’ve added another bit to it about closing your eyes for four seconds in effect you’re closing your eyes for four seconds on the road you’re not looking at the road so in that four seconds at 30 mile an hour you’re traveling I don’t know about 50 meters up to 60 mile an hour on the A449 which is around by ourselves you’re traveling the length of a Premier League football pitch without looking around so effective you close your eyes for the entire length of the football pitch whilst driving and the look on the parents face as well so it does have an effect not just on the young drivers but on the adult too attended as well


[00:11:33 – 00:14:01] Jon: I think for me, you talked about the VR goggles. So kind of like you, my lad’s 18, watches stuff, is involved with PlayStation, lots of different things. And I was really surprised. that he had to keep taking his goggles off because he found it really distressing to watch because what you’re essentially doing when you’re wearing them is you’re in the vehicle and you can see everybody around you who’s been injured you can see the emergency services working on a number of passengers you can hear them you can see exactly what injuries they’ve sustained and that was something that really sparked a lot of conversation in our house. afterwards just because of the amount of damage that was caused by that simple distraction and I think in the video one of the passengers is trying to show the driver something on her phone so she’s kind of leaning through the gap and trying to show him something on the phone and just that moment of distraction with like the music and the noise in the car and that piece of farm machinery pulls out of a you know of a gate that can’t be seen and and you know The impact is huge. Like I say, I think that really sparked a lot of conversation because it was so realistic. You were in that car and seeing what happened. If it starts a conversation and that conversation is then one that’s taken into college or into the workplace or into the pub, then the message is going through to the right people. The text message, one that you talked about as well, I thought that that was really powerful. or just reading that message, as you said, we all timed it on our phone. And then when you look at the distance that you’ve traveled and, you know, you were all very honest. Everybody was admitting to things that they’d done in the past. You know, it was perfectly pitched in terms of trying to engage what I can imagine is quite a difficult audience at times, you know, kids are there because their parents have took them along. You know, it was really well received. There was a lot of honest conversation in there. There are bad little things just to try and recognize when you’re doing something that is potentially going to have an impact. and how that can lead to your driving being improved because of it and not just for the the younger ones that were there but as you say the adults were taking stuff away as well and Ben was part of those sessions wasn’t he he’s done a couple of them yeah


[00:14:00 – 00:14:42] Adam: he’s attended quite a few yeah he doesn’t seem too affected by it and i think he just wants to get his points across because he has trouble with writing once or so now it’s been hard i mean this is the reason why i’ve done it because it isn’t just that night that it happened it’s been that night has been really for the last two years pretty much and I wouldn’t want any family to get through it and the families I’ve been working with who have been even more unlucky than we have and that worst time of their life you know I’ll see them I’ll interview them I’ll speak to them and you just think no I’ll just you’ve got to do something to try and help this because it’s just It is a remnant like you don’t realise till you start digging into it more than how many people affected by this.


[00:14:41 – 00:14:59] Jon: Yeah. When I think we came along, there was a potential that it was going to be, it was coming to an end, that they weren’t going to allow it to continue. But since that, they’ve changed the format up a little bit, I think. And I’ve seen it being advertised at other stations now in West


[00:14:58 – 00:14:59] Adam: Yeah.


[00:14:58 – 00:14:59] Jon: Mids.


[00:14:58 – 00:15:36] Adam: Obviously the pushback came to start with about changing it and then It’s really nice to know that the prevention team at West Midlands have been behind it and they’ve said no they’re keeping it as is. There’s a few little tweaks but nothing major and myself and Sammy you met on the night have since been to Sturridge to deliver sessions there and we’ve delivered one at Walsall two weeks ago and now I might be moving to a department I don’t know yet because they want me to work alongside the prevention team and cascading it around all the brigade and the whole organisation so. So he’s going around the organisation there because it was identified as an area for improvement for the fire service to do anyway,


[00:15:35 – 00:15:36] Jon: And


[00:15:35 – 00:15:46] Adam: because I think because of the spike in the amount of deaths at this age. So yeah, it is going organisation wide now, which has been nice for myself to get it over the line.


[00:15:45 – 00:15:51] Jon: you’ve had recognition personally as well because you were awarded a Community Ambassador Award.


[00:15:50 – 00:15:52] Adam: Cherry on


[00:15:51 – 00:15:52] Jon: Cherry


[00:15:51 – 00:15:52] Adam: the cake.


[00:15:51 – 00:16:31] Jon: on the cake. So that was something nice to just be recognised for what. That’s doing. So in terms of attendance, obviously there’s still lots of information on social media platforms and things and we can put some links on the podcast so that people can find out a little bit more about it. It’s just about raising awareness and hopefully spreading it across regions so that other forces get the opportunity to carry something like this out in their areas and improve behaviour. Just starting those conversations as we say about improving things, things that you can do just to keep yourself a bit safer when you’re out on the roads.


[00:16:30 – 00:16:37] Adam: That’s it. It’s not about scaring people. It’s about hopefully starting off on the right foot if they’re just learning to drive.


[00:16:36 – 00:16:37] Jon: Yeah.


[00:16:36 – 00:16:45] Adam: The likes of our age is hopefully improving our behaviours on the road from learning what we tell you on the night time, what we deliver on the night time.


[00:16:44 – 00:16:48] Jon: Have you had driving instructors come along? Because I’ve seen some comments yet. Yeah.


[00:16:47 – 00:17:01] Adam: I mean, online we’ve probably had about 20, 30 driving instructors giving input. We’ve probably had about 10 or 12 attendance sessions and spread the word themselves as well. And I’ve started on their Facebook pages.


[00:17:00 – 00:17:02] Jon: Yeah.


[00:17:01 – 00:17:05] Adam: And the feedback has been unbelievable.


[00:17:04 – 00:17:07] Jon: It has. It’s so positive. Yeah.


[00:17:06 – 00:17:13] Adam: Yeah, no negativity whatsoever. It’s just been phenomenal. And we could sell the sessions out four or five times over every time.


[00:17:12 – 00:17:41] Jon: Which is testament to you and. I know it’s like there’s a team of you present as well isn’t there so it’s you know everybody’s really taken this on board and supported you in running it as an initiative so you know from for me as a mum thank you for doing that because as I say it started conversations in our house that we wouldn’t have had otherwise but I know that you know there’s going to be lots of families who are really grateful for you running these sessions and taking the initiative to start something like this and to start those conversations.


[00:17:41 – 00:17:49] Adam: It’s like you say, I couldn’t have done it without my team, which is Red Watch, super massive thank you to the prevention team at West Midlands as well.


[00:17:48 – 00:18:00] Jon: And fingers crossed that it starts getting rolled out and, you know, we’re in West Mercia here. So hopefully it will start to filter through and trickle through to stations in this region too.


[00:17:59 – 00:18:01] Adam: I think it will


[00:18:00 – 00:18:01] Jon: Yeah.


[00:18:00 – 00:18:08] Adam: be because of all the publicity at the moment with the amount of fatalities there is, so I think it will go nationwide. So yeah.


[00:18:07 – 00:18:11] Jon: Thanks for your time today. Good to see you. Okay, take care. Bye.


[00:18:10 – 00:18:13] Adam: Thank you. Bye.


[00:18:13 – 00:18:30] Voiceover Person: Thanks to Debbie and to our special guest Paul. If you have a legal issue you’d like me to put to our team to cover in an upcoming episode, please let me know by visiting lblaw.co.uk forward slash knowledge where you can search for all our podcasts. That’s lblaw.co.uk forward slash knowledge.


[00:18:30 – 00:18:34] Amanda: That was the Legal Lounge from Lanyon Bowdler Solicitors.