Advanced driver training by Brent Group
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• Brent Group drivers are being trained to standards higher than those laid down for the hgv licence, said Mr John Silbermann, group managing director, on Tuesday. He was speaking at the opening of the company's Advanced Driving Unit at Hornchurch, Essex. To make good some of the 60,000 drivers leaving the industry every year, sizeable firms must increasingly accept responsibility for driver training, said Mr Silbermann. It was necessary for operators to insist on high standards of driving, high standards of vehicle design and first class maintenance. And customers must be educated to understand the special difficulties of the economically essential road haulage industry.
There was no escaping the fact that the higher standards now called for would mean that tonnage rates which were no more than 30s a year ago would have to increase to perhaps 50 or 60s. Exactly the same forces would operate in the sphere of own-account transport, said Mr Silbermann.
Mr Eric Tindall, director general, Road Transport Industry Training Board, said his Board contemplated a driver training target for hgv drivers of from 15,000 to 20,000 a year. He was not entirely sanguine as to the training provision likely to be made by the other elements in the industry but he welcomed the initiative and the high standards laid down for the Brent Group training scheme.
The Brent Group's advanced driver training courses are geared to the experience of the drivers; conversion from rigid to articulated driving takes five days, the practical driving tests being supplemented by classroom lectures at the group's Hornchurch depot.
A noteworthy feature of the driving area time is hired at a Hornchurch autodrome—is that reversing tests are carried out on loose soil. Mounds of earth have been dumped at intervals on a large area of ground and this enables articulated vehicles to be manoeuvred realistically as though on a building site.
Chief instructor Mr Alec Paul passed out with flying colours at the RTITB's Motec at High Ercall.