FOREIGN DRIVERS
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I read with interest the fetter "Forget the rhetoric" by W Reid (CM7-13 Dec 2000) and found it interesting that you asked the views of your readers on the subject of foreign drivers.
Firstly, although some may see foreign drivers as the enemy or as a threat to the UK haulage industry, we have to face up to the fact that transport companies in the UK are not able to keep up with the demand for the transport of goods both within the UK and throughout Europe.
There are a few reasons for this: there is a much advertised driver shortage; and running trucks costs a lot more today than it has ever cost before, therefore leaving the smaller operator withdrawing from the business either by choice, or because he has not been watching the game closely enough and has developed a few debts that he cannot afford to pay.
The influx of European and non-EL drivers that are entering the UK will keep rising while there are not enough drivers and hauliers to meet the demand for the movement of goods. This, combined with the difference in salaries and licens
ing regulations of each country, including the tax differences, will leave the UK transport industry lagging behind the rest of Europe. We cannot blame or accuse the drivers that come to this country. They are but a version of ourselves, with a different cost of living.
To a UK driver, £100 per week is a pittance but to a Bulgarian driver it could probably feed his entire family.
The real problem is the poor standard of driving such drivers often display and the lack of policing by our own authorities that lets the nation down. Only last month a Belgian HGV was involved in an accident with another HGV carrying paint which had broken down on the hard shoulder of a motorway. The end result was that the motorway closed for several hours and the Belgian HGV driver was taken to hospital. It then turned out that the Belgian driver was a more 18 years old—a boy who, under UK regulations cannot legally drive an HGV.
Yet here he is travelling in a foreign country, where people drive on what he would see as the wrong side of the road.
The Belgians appear to have solved the problem of their driver shortage by taking teenagers from behind the counter of McDonalcis and putting them behind the wheel of 41-tonners!
So it's all well and good to let foreign drivers loose on our roads, but let's find a way to ensure that they have the knowledge and experience to know when to park up and an understanding of how the road networks of the UK differ from their own. Or what the hell— why don't we just start giving UK HGV driving licences away to our own teenagers? After all, they could probably earn 20p an hour more driving a truck than working at McDonalds!
John Hunt, Freightmatch UKL, Derbyshire.