AN award-winning road safety campaign will be launched in Essex to help reduce fatal and serious injury crashes involving young or inexperienced drivers.

The Honest Truth campaign uses images of young men and women with the heads of animals and birds to identify poor driving habits that can lead to serious collisions.

In Essex, a young person is killed, on average, every 28 days, while another suffers a serious injury every 36 hours.

Essex Police will launch the campaign later this month, with Essex Casualty Reduction Board.

They will be working closely with driving instructors, the fire and rescue service and the road safety teams in Essex, Southend and Thurrock.

Adam Pipe, Essex Police’s casualty reduction manager, said: “The safety of young people remains a priority. All too often officers deal with the tragic consequences of road traffic collisions involving young drivers and passengers.”

In the campaign images, speeding drivers are represented by cheetahs, drinkers by a bulldog, drug users by a chameleon and mobile phone users by a parrot. A driver with no insurance is shown as an ass and show-offs as peacocks.

Those who fail to wear seatbelts are shown as a rhino – to showhow a passenger without a seatbelt can be thrown around in a crashing car with the same effect as a charging rhinoceros.

The campaign was developed in south Devon after a road crash in which three young people aged nine, 17 and 19 died. It proved a huge success, won numerous national awards and is being adopted by partnerships across the UK.

On average each year in Essex, 98 collisions involve young car drivers.

Of these young drivers, four are killed and a further 65 seriously injured. However, in 40 of these collisions, while the young driver is not injured, their actions are a contributory factor in the deaths of four other road users and in the serious injury of a further 47.

While these young drivers may not be physically injured, they have to live with this knowledge.

Essex Casualty Reduction Board will hold three seminars to launch the campaign and issue free resources to approved driving instructors across the county.

They will be at the Essex Police Sports Association Pavilion at police headquarters, Chelmsford, on Monday, October 27, between 6pm and 8pm, and on Tuesday, October 28, between 10am and noon, and from 1.30pm to 3.30pm.

To book a place, email Sgt Graham Freeman on 1273@ essex.pnn.police.uk with your preferred date and time.