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All I want for 2004...
Page 8
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Barry Proctor sends his New Year wish list not to Santa, who has his own logistics problems, but to the government
As we usher the old year out and welcome the new one in with a glass of something warming, it's time to sit back, take stock and consider what we want for the forthcoming 12 months.
For some people this involves making those notoriously hard-to-keep resolutions. Personally I'd rather not, if only to spare myself the crippling guilt that inevitably follows failing just three days in. Regardless of which, we all want something from the new year, and aside from my annual mostly unfulfilled wish that Stoke City win the remainder of their games I do have a number of requests to make of HM Government: 1. With the Working Time Directive (WTD) hurtling towards us, threatening the sort of impact on our industry that a hyperactive three-year-old would have on your Christmas tree, it would be nice for the government to give us a vague idea of the rules we're going to have to adhere to. Given the amount of time you've already wasted on this, could we have the rules soon please? Before we're all out of a job would be nice.
2. Given that the WTD is on its way, might the Minister for Learning and Skills please look at ways of freeing up cash to train folk to drive trucks?
3. It would be nice if you could cut fuel tax so we no longer have to pawn our wives' jewellery to pay the diesel man.
4. Lorry Road User Charging is due to start in 2006. Any chance of some vague idea as to how it's going to work?
5. Please, fight a damn sight harder to free all those British drivers unfairly jailed abroad.
6. I've got this friend; we'll call him Stan for the sake of argument. Anyway, Stan's got this wonderful invention that could save us all time and money, cut pollution and congestion and generally make the industry more efficient. Will someone in government please take his twin-trailer rig a little more seriously? At the moment it seems that its being ignored in favour of outlandish things like rail freight. Barry Proctor owns Barry Proctor Services, which is based in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire.