Guy I work with has a small local indi. Who, on Sat, told someone ‘you don’t normally fuel here, so fuck off to wherever you normally fuel I don’t want your money!’ Local fuel for local people.
Probably in this thread yes I’ve read elsewhere it’s 60K, however not all of these also hold an ADR licence. Something which seems to be lost within this media driven frenzy, suddenly not all ADR licensed drivers left the haulage industry overnight. The only fuel company with a driver shortage and hence a problem with stocking all the fuel grades in the quantities required was BP. But the media spun it that the ADR driver shortage was across the whole of the network, irresponsible journalism. The shortage of haulage drivers stems from a lot of different factors not least pay and conditions. The RHA have been warning of this shortage would come for sometime now maybe a decade or more.
Rocking all over Kent that's funny Adam, the only person that could work out this mess is someone like Alan Turing, but he's dead so we're all fecked for this weekend.
Thousands of Germans who live in the UK have been written to by the government asking them to drive lorries in an attempt to ease the UK fuel crisis, even though the majority have never been at the wheel of an HGV. They were included in a 1m-letter mass mailing that also tried to recruit ambulance drivers to get behind the wheel of lorries. The recruitment drive is aimed at easing the UK’s supply chain shortages and a lack of petrol at forecourts. This just gets better and better!
Everyone that has a HGV licence that doesn't currently drive got one. I know several. So if they have a licence and eligible to drive, they would have got one
You know it, that’ll be working the maximum permitted hours on the most anti social of hours. A mate of mine did night trunking when he lost his job as a truck painter, he gained his licence whilst a painter as his company paid for it. Did it as filling job until he could get a job elsewhere. Worst part for him was staying awake in a truck limited to 56 mph, gave up once he got a job with more social able hours. He’ll not ever drive a truck again guaranteed.
And this kind of smart individual is why you have a fuel 'crisis'. Other than the fact they were too stupid to spot the fact it wasn't a fuel tanker. Kind of funny they wasted fuel to find it wasn't fuel
We'll, we don't have a HGV licence. Our normal car licence, if obtained before 1997, lets us drive a 7.5 ton vehicle with a 7.5 ton single axle trailer behind it. There were such rigs but I haven't seen one for a long time never mind having driven one.
It's just data and a very basic formula. Some data somewhere says you have a license that lets you drive a goods vehicle. Doesn't have to be an artic I'd assume. That dataset could be wrong, I'm guessing it would come from DVLA though. The way people go on, you'd think a man is sat there in a dark corner of a room reviewing millions of people's licenses writing hand written letters with a special wax seal .
25 or 30 years ago I drove lorries for a family run haulage firm. Started doing 7.5 tonne on my car licence but they put me through HGV training. I have never been on a holiday so I used my holidays from employment to do holiday cover for them (plus some additional time off). It must have been worth their while to do that with me rather than hire agency drivers, who they probably wouldn't know anyway. The three sons in the business - who all drove - more or less cracked up with the stress. I wouldn't do it again. Trying to find somewhere to park before your hours run out, shithole facilities with stinking expensive showers that usually don't work, virtually no toilets where you can park at, police and traffic commissioners routinely stopping you, idiot drivers, cyclists (and bikers) up the inside of you on corners and at mini roundabouts, if held up by roadworks (or whatever) you miss your delivery slot and have to wait 24 hours, homosexuals banging on your windows at night because your backdoors are open (WTF!), stinking whores harassing you at lorry parks - no thank you. The stories I have heard from agency employed drivers are pretty bad - the amount of money the agencies take should be illegal, they routinely fail to pass on overtime/bonus payments and treat the drivers like third class citizens. It is not the only industry that does that though, offshore springs to mind for example. You would need to be pretty desperate to train as an HGV driver in Britain and it must be a lot worse on the roads now too. Combine that with the obvious fact that very few people in this country now want to do proper jobs and it is no surprise that there is a shortage of drivers. The same could be said for engineering, nursing, building trades and as many others. I even know someone (a very capable guy too) who was a senior offshore electrical guy for the biggest oil company in the world and left the job to work stacking shelves in Tesco - he said the money was not that much less and he got to sleep in his own bed at night.
