On Thursday HGV tests accelerating at dangerous speed
YOU might’ve heard backalong there aren’t enough HGV drivers, variously triggering petrol shortages, inflation, and Christmas being cancelled. It’s been blamed on Covid, Brexit, a ‘z’ in the month, and probably Uncle Tom Cobley and all. A cause not suggested is an attitude problem. You see, since Tony Blair reckoned everyone should go to university, and become rich and brilliant, the insidious message inferred has been very clear. An over educated urban elite imagine only poor and stupid people do menial or manual work – and we can bring migrants from impoverished countries for that kind of thing. Boris continues the trend, going on about how we’re going to be a ‘high skill/high wage’ economy or somesuch… and it boils my juices.
It’s subtle, and a barely conscious direction of travel, but it’s entrenched now – the idea that people doing such work are ‘lesser’. A generation imagine that, firstly, such work is beneath them, and secondly – by default – that so are the people who do it. It is a pernicious and dangerous thing to have allowed, as it fuels social division… ironic given how the luvvies who think we can all get a degree and become brain surgeons mostly pretend to cling to the idea of being loved up and inclusive.
Luckily, as the shortage of lorry drivers started to manifest itself, Sir Boris cantered along on his charger to solve the crisis. He discovered that the driving examiners who test lorry drivers had a tremendous backlog. He noticed – or had ‘people’ notice on his behalf – that a lot of testing time was bogged down on folk who just wanted to tow a caravan down to Cornwall for the weekend, or to tow Samantha and her darling little pony to Pony Club. And they’re all having to take the silly ‘trailer test’. Well, he could jolly well fix that, and simply did away with it. As of the 15th of November, it was to be a free-for-all.
And as you may have noticed, that date has just come and gone, but the roads aren’t suddenly jammed with newly entitled drivers discovering that reversing a trailer is different, and difficult. I don’t know what happened, or what is happening, but Boris abandoned the change at the last minute. I gather I’m not the only person in the dark about what’s going on – with a couple of useful lads currently left in limbo. It’s due to go before parliament in the next week or two… where, I’m sure, it’ll all be sorted out toot sweet.
Better still are the related but bizarre goings on with the HGV1 test – the category that includes the biggest articulated lorries. I’m hearing that, to push more drivers through the test, the requirements are being watered down somewhat.
It sounds like an HGV1 licence is as likely to drop out of a breakfast cereal packet as the plastic toy. As I understand it, the proposal is that you’ll be able to pass your HGV1 without proving to an examiner that you can reverse the articulated trailer, or astoundingly, show that you’re competent and confident about hooking it onto the tractor unit – that’s the bit at the front with the cab and engine…. and rather importantly, the brakes’ power supply. The presumption will be that your instructor – ie. someone potentially under your immediate employ – ensures you’ve attained these minor skills.
Perhaps we should step back and consider the basic physics here. See, stopping 44 tonnes of speeding Scania, and its 23 tonne load of frozen fish fingers/hot water bottles/paperclips, takes rather more braking power than slowing up a Ford Focus. The tractor unit obviously has very powerful brakes of its own, but critically, once properly hooked up to the trailer by those prettily coloured coiled plastic pipes, it also powers the trailer brakes. Should the trailer brakes fail, the tractor units brakes can still slow the front bit down in an emergency, while the bulk of the weight being towed then tries to overtake the tractor unit. This results in ‘Sally Traffic’ reporting a road being closed due to a ‘jack-knifed truck’ and a ‘shed load’. Large messy events you probably don’t want to be too close to.
And the suggestion is that no-one independent is going to be assuring future drivers actually know how to prevent this kind of thing. Current extra driver ‘CPC’ training – a mandatory one day per year – is flimsy enough, but this would take standards to a new level… a dangerously low one. Like those insane ‘smart motorways’, people will die in otherwise preventable accidents.
It’s a mess, and reveals the disconnect between the elevated strata where Boris resides, and where those grubby thick chaps do the actual work.