Show Notes Some areas of fleet management are highly regulated but that doesn’t always mean that these fleets are managed well. Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Sarah Bell, Traffic Commissioner for London and the South East, to discuss some the common failures seen regularly at operator level and what it looks like to be a good operator. https://www.drivingforbetterbusiness.com/podcast/episode/women-in-transport/sarah-bell/   Useful Links Information about Traffic Commissionershttps://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/traffic-commissioners Traffic Commissioner's Twitterhttps://twitter.com/TrafficCommsGB Sign up to receive news alerts from the Traffic Commissionershttps://public.govdelivery.com/accounts/UKOTC/subscriber/new   Transcript DfBB Women in Transport Podcast Anne-Marie: Welcome to the Driving for Better Business podcast celebrating women working in transport, fleet management, and road safety. Now, some areas of fleet management are highly regulated but that doesn’t always mean that these fleets are managed well. Today, I’m thrilled to be joined by Sarah Bell, Traffic Commissioner for London and the South East.Sarah, welcome to the Driving for Better Business podcast. You’ve had over 20 years of working with the transport industry and now as a Traffic Commissioner. How did your career develop? Sarah: First of all Anne-Marie thank you for inviting me, following Jo Shiner – difficult footsteps to follow but I’ll do my best. My career... developed is probably too sophisticated a word for it. It flowed, really. I qualified as a solicitor in 1993, with a regional practice down on the South Coast. I stayed with them until 1995, but then I wanted to get into commercial litigation but there were no positions there, so I went elsewhere. And bizarrely I ended up doing maritime litigation as well as commercial litigation. So, for example, marine accident investigations, helping their clients weave their way through the interviews, etcetera. And then also defending health and safety executive prosecutions for their clients. And so it was regulatory as well as litigation – which is not something which I had originally signed up to. But then the opportunity came for me to take that back to the firm where I had originally trained, which was lovely because I hadn’t actually particularly wanted to leave in the first place, it was just that there wasn’t the sort of role that I had wanted. And we developed a wider regulatory practice. They already were RHA panel solicitors, so I started doing that work with them – so representing operators, transport managers and drivers before my predecessors as traffic commissioners, and also in the criminal courts. But at the same time, I moved from defending HSE prosecutions which I had done at my previous firm, to actually prosecuting as a solicitor agent for the Health and Safety Executive. So I have – as they say - played on both sides of the fence. I’m a prosecutor and a defence solicitor by expertise. But then in 2006 I was approached by the recruitment consultants that were in charge of recruiting the new traffic commissioner for the West of England. And they said, “why haven’t you applied?” and I said I didn’t know that Phillip was retiring – which was a big faux pas as he wasn’t retiring, just moving London and the South East. And so that’s how I ended up being a traffic commissioner. Anne-Marie: Fantastic, so your experience – on both sides of the fence – has been quite broad. And you mentioned, you joined the West of England as Traffic Commissioner and now you’re the responsible for the South East. What are the responsibilities of a traffic commissioner? Sarah: They are wide and varied. First of all we don’t sort out anyone’s parking tickets, unfortunately, which is what most people think if they don’t know about regulation of commercial vehicles. What we actually do is we regulate the bus, coach and haulage industry, and their vocational drivers. There are eight traffic c