Government asks German residents to drive lorries even if they never have before
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
Edit: Netherlands also has something similar with older licenses, so it's likely that not only Germans but more foreigners in the UK got this letter.
If I got a truck license more than 20 years ago (before 1999) but never drove a truck in my life, I would definitely feel uncomfortable driving a truck. Shit, I feel a bit uncomfortable driving my car after a two or three month break. For 20 years to elapse between licensing and putting that activity into practice seems justifiably eyebrow raising to me. The headline doesn't even mention the 20 elapsed years part of it.
Provided you take corners carefully and use all the mirrors, a "box van" or a smaller "Luton" is easy enough to drive. The controls are pretty obvious and familiar but hillstarts and reverse hill starts need a little practice. When loaded, allow extra stopping and maneuvering space!
I like being able to just rent one if I need it, without going through complex licensing rigamarole like you do in Europe, and apparently lack of it has not caused the society to collapse ( we have not had terrorist truck attacks either). I find the American lenient system much more preferable.
It was pretty much the same in Germany. It was changed when the system was switched over to the new European driving license which was implemented in July 1996. Anyone who got theirs after the change will usually only have class B for up to 3.5t plus a 0.75t trailer.
I'm a German who actually happens to have C1E. So who much do you currently pay for lorry drivers?
If you search for "salary HGV UK" you get £19-24K. That was probably last year and frankly wrong, now.
I'm an IT consultant and MD of the firm and now wondering if I should get my big rig thang on! OK, I can drive a 7.5 tonner on my driver's license and have done so, many times. I can also drag a trailer, according to my license.
I think it's pretty reasonable to expect that older licenses that had these sort of automatic endorsements unbacked by any experience should have been excluded from the letters – so there is a story here. 1999 was 22 years ago!
EDIT: Downvote? For giving extra information? In case this is post-Brexit racism, I don't live in the UK so keep it to yourselves.
These days the licenses are only valid for 10 years, so the picture might actually be useful.
It sure was. Back then, a mule pulled my car. We didn't have rubber tires, I'd take the wheels to the wheelwright's shop and have a new iron rim put on now and then. On the weekends I'd go varmint hunting with my trusty flintlock.
But some of the fanciest programs, like the Bourne Shell, were even more automatic: they didn't have to manually manage each allocation either. You'd simply write right on the heap and have your SIGSEGV handler do a brk() every so often!
To free up memory on our systems, we bought new system and moved the old ones into a landfill.
Permanent storage was on stone tablets, but read/write times were REALLY LONG. Backups took a really long time, too. Restoring was pretty quick, because you would just put the last-known-good tablets into the machine.
That's essentially a lorry.
On a related note there's a meme going around of Boris asking the Queen if she would drive a truck since she did in WW2.
It's a bug in the query, at most.
One 41-year-old German man, who received two copies of the letter at his London home on Friday morning, one addressed to him and another for his wife, told The Independent.
“We were quite surprised,” he said. “I’m sure pay and conditions for HGV drivers have improved, but ultimately I have decided to carry on in my role at an investment bank. My wife has never driven anything larger than a Volvo, so she is also intending to decline the exciting opportunity.
“It is nice to know there are specialist jobs available here for us though after Brexit. We would never have been headhunted to drive a lorry if we’d gone back to Germany.”
sort of like a inverse soviet union. "If filled supermarkets were so important, the committee would have made it happen".
Texans freezing to death, German's can't make any cars because there's no chips, Brits have no fuel, but we have a gazillion consultants and bankers. The market has spoken
Also I'm unaware of whether or not the UK government, one of largest and oldest bureaucracies in the world actually anticipate this and provided the advice necessary.
It was never obvious what sort of deal would be done between Europe & the UK govt. from the point of the referendum until quite on late on there was discussion of varying degrees of access to the common market and freedom of movement.
Everything was up in the air politically and diplomatically until the last minute for 4 years and then there was a pandemic (no lorry driver training or testing for over a year)
It’s not contentious that the problem is largely of the UKs own making but management incompetence at a company level is probably not to blame in most cases.
That is to say, the market is reacting now.
To the market's credit, it hedged a few years hoping the UK wouldn't shit the bed, giving us some relative stability post-referendum. Until the UK started filling its pants and blaming everyone else for the stink.
Especially since creation EU is a 'centralised choice' to begin with
All that matters is the balance between supply and demand.
Lorry drivers are paid shit because, despite the pressure and bad conditions, they're relatively easy to train up (sure it takes time, so this isn't helping right now), there are plenty of people willing to put up with shit conditions for a few years at a time (always fresh supply), and most of them are hauling shit around for retail consumption which has low profit argins.
Software developers at investment banks (for example) are paid well because there's huge demand, supply of good developers with the right domain knowledge is short, and they work in a lucrative industry.
You're on HN so I imagine you're earning as much as, if not more than, this investment banker.
When they mow down a pedestrian crossing full of school children, the government can just say "Those dastardly Germans of the past!" except this time it'll be continued with "Why did they give unqualified people truck driving licenses?".
Is it possible he just likes living in the UK?
I don't see a 'complaint about Brexit' in his response.
In fact, being a German citizen I'm sure he didn't even get a vote on the subject.
Instead, it may be good to remind him that continental europeans drove trucks right before Brexit, and that if he absolutely insists that only Brits should be doing those jobs, that raising wages[2] tend to attract more employees.
Or, alternatively, he could always mobilize the army to drive trucks, rather than guarding petrol stations.
[1] Allright, allright, I suppose the immortal queen may not have been driving trucks in that war.
[2] By more than a pittance.
"People need to stop and think... driving a tanker, no matter what the product, is quite a pressurised job, so following them puts extra pressure on drivers already under pressure without having to worry about absolute morons."
It's wonderfully salacious that they're asking german drivers. Germans are widely seen as the driving force behind the EU buerocracy that mandated Brexit in the first place. Oh, the irony!
UK -> (Long) Ton =2240 lbs
Metric -> Tonne = ~2205 lbs
That make this current problem rather more difficult as the UK government can't just start importing foreign truck drivers to fix this issue, as that would then be a back flip on that original Brexit plan.
I doubt that you could find many German truckers even if you were looking for them at a German truck stop.
What an irrelevant statement. Unless Germany is also experiencing a driver shortage.
A friend of mine is the commercial of a company selling security detail services from Ukrainian ex-militia/military, and they started offering driver services, because the demand augmented that much in mainland europe (mainly east of germany, as they are the trips that pay the less).
There may well be driver shortages in Europe, but it doesn't compare to the 'critical driver shortages' facing the UK.
And it is clear these shortages are 'critical', only because in the UK some supermarket shelves are empty and the supply of petrol is under heavy stress.
"Chief secretary to the Treasury, Simon Clarke, told the BBC’s Today programme yesterday. 'The difficulties we are facing are not unique to this country.'"