• COMMENT OPEN WOUNDS
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• Only the foolish apply ointment to a wound when it is already going septic: the wise man salves the cut when it is first made.
If one haulage company in two cannot recruit HGV drivers; if one in ten is losing contracts because of that lack; if three out of five think that the HGV driving test is irrelevant; if one in five has jobs going begging — as our exclusive survey reveals this week — then it seems obvious that the cut is already starting to fester.
The incision was made at the start of the decade, as the recession smashed Britain's traditional manufacturing base to smithereens and left the haulage industry with plenty of trucks, plenty of drivers and nothing to carry. The industry recoiled in horror from its wound, dumping drivers onto the dole, closing training schools, contracting everything out and battening down the hatches to survive.
Mrs Thatcher and her Government's hatred of the quango-like industrial training boards further infected the wound. The Road Transport Industry Training Board narrowly survived the closures and battled gamely on, with less to spend and fewer firms in its scope — the PSV industry was taken away from the RTITB, for instance.
The end result, of course, was that those sacked drivers either took jobs in other industries, retired or became self-employed. Nowhere near enough new drivers entered training schemes and the industry sowed the seeds of the disaster it is now about to reap.
Even now there is precious little incentive for a keen youngster to become a truck driver. Top fleets pay well, in line with their prestigious image, but you have to wait in dead men's shoes to join them. The alternative is to join a smaller firm, work your way up to a staggering 110 a week and get nothing but hassle in return.
If the economic cycle continues to rise and the haulage industry continues to grow, it had better start healing its driver wounds really fast. Major surgery could soon be the only alternative.