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STAND UP FOR STANDARDS
Page 5
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• The Road Transport Industry Training Board is to be applauded for its stand on HGV driver training.
It is intolerable that anyone with an HGV licence can set up an HGV driver training school: it leaves novice drivers open to exploitation by unscrupulous trainers, and brings into question the safety standards of the entire industry. Only last week the Government set standards for anyone supervising novice car drivers, but refused to extend those standards to protect HGV and PSV learners. The Department of Transport reasoned that "The industry itself should be capable of ensuring that learners are taught and supervised safely."
What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the HGV trainee driver: the industry can only ensure that learners are taught and supervised safely if it has the power to wipe out cowboy training companies, and clearly the old RTITB system did not have the teeth it needed to do the job. Let's hope that the RTITB's new register will become so well known, and so well policed, that all novice HGV drivers will insist on RTITBapproved instructors when choosing their course.
Without the legislative backing that the Department of Transport seems unable to give there is little else that can be done.
A truck driver can spend 40 years driving the highways of Britain in a vehicle with many times the potential destructive force of cars or motorcycles. Yet while the Dip rightly maintains some control over car and motorcycle instructors, it leaves the heavies open to abuse, and relies on the industry to police itself.
Road transport more than adequately covers its track costs — is it too much to ask that some of the surplus be ploughed back into training?