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It will be having the will to do it. Rail in the uk needs to change with less passengers maybe freight needs to become priority. Ok could we see as has happened in aviation trains becoming combi part passenger part freight. In a way this is being tried on Scotrail with the addition of repurposed class 153 to carry bicycles but you could put cages in with cargo now what kind of cages how about BRUTES……..  What about a swap body say half a MPV attached to a dmu it could carry a container. So how could this be used let’s say Tesco’s loaded a container at Wentloog this was then attached to a service to Pembroke dock. At PD a mobile container crane lifts it off straight in to Tesco’s yard and sends back an empty container. Now how many supermarkets are built next to railway lines or over them.

 

Keith

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The September edition of Modern Railways has an interesting article about the potential for modal shift between lorries and moving stuff by rail. 

 

It notes that there has been an increase in companies expressing an interest in moving goods by rail and a number of trails have taken place and some new flows started. It also notes some new fairly short flows for container traffic such as Tees Port to Doncaster and London (Barking) to Daventry. Overall it suggests that around 38% of existing lorry tonne/km could be suitable to move by rail. This of course depends on having suitable terminals, amount of traffic and train paths available.

 

Regards 

 

Nick 

 

 

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1 hour ago, Ron Ron Ron said:

 

 

While agreeing to the sentiment that this shouldn't get too political, let's get some facts straight.

 

Brexit has played a minor part in this, even though it has added to the number of different problems affecting the driver shortage.

The Truck driver shortage has been brewing for years and it affects most of Western Europe, for many of the same reasons.

The same situation of using cheaper labour from Eastern Europe has afflicted countries like Germany too.

 

There are industry estimates that the shortage of drivers across Europe, is in the region of around 400,000.

In the UK there are widely varying estimates that the shortage here is between 60,000 and 76,000; which is indeed high.

 

In Poland, with a population that is only slightly over half of that of the UK and the source of many drivers working in Western Europe, they are short of around 124,000 drivers !!!!

 

There has been a shortfall in Germany for a few years, recently exacerbated by the pandemic, where thousands of East Europeans also went back to their home countries.

According to ‘Die Welt’ , before the pandemic, about 40,000 truck drivers retired every year, with only around 16,000 completing their training. 

They now have an estimated shortfall of 45,000 to 60,000 drivers.

Estimates predict a shortfall in Germany of 185,000 drivers by 2027.

 

France already had a reported shortfall of around 43,000 drivers, pre-pandemic.

 

These reported shortages span from Scandinavia to Spain and from Ireland to Central Europe.

The economic slow down, even shut down in some instances, as a result of the pandemic striking in 2020, reduced the amount of work and when there's no work, for many of the Eastern Europeans that meant no pay. A factor in many of them returning to their home countries.

In Germany, there has been concern that many have not come back.

 

 

.

Good points, but it isn't just Europe - serious driver shortages are reported in the US and Canada too.

 

Besides the issues already raised, the fact is that driving an HGV just isn't an attractive career any more. 'Knights of the Road' visiting far flung exotic places it ain't. Driving is no longer a pleasure (I'm told, I don't drive). Truckers have to cope with congestion, accidents, stroppy and officious border officials etc. They are expected to master other skills in paperwork and its electronic equivalent, which means IT. They are at risk, not just of accidents, but of robberies and hijackings, and of being collared for inadvertently imported illegal migrants. Places they can safely pull over for their breaks are diminishing, (and remember how at the start of the pandemic they weren't being allowed to use restrooms at the firms they were delivering too).

 

And if you do want to make a living from driving, why take a job that requires you to spend many nights, vulnerable, kipping in your cab, when you could be meeting the rapidly growing demand for local/last mile delivery drivers - les risk, 'gig economy' hours if that's your thing (and a lot of people do like working that way) and you get to sleep in your own bed every night! What's not to like.

 

Specifically on Brexit, it must have had some effect but it is truly unquantifiable. Far more Europeans than expected signed up to continue their residency/work rights, but there are many reasons why they may not be exercising those. The pandemic, obviously - you probably don't want to leave your family when 'death is stalking the streets', and you may not wish to risk being stranded, perhaps for weeks, if the UK, or Poland, or any of the countries you travel through, do something creative with travel restrictions. 

 

More generally, even before Covid, and indeed before Brexit, working abroad was becoming less attractive/important for citizens of many Central/East European countries, for the simple reason that their home economies were doing rather well. While I am sure they have their pockets of deprivation like we do, overall the Polish unemployment rate was down around 3%, which is as close to full employment as it gets in a modern economy, and their wage rates were converging with those of Western Europe.

 

We, and other West European countries (and the US too) have built economies based on an endless supply of cheap, available labour, whether that be manufacturing in the Far East, or services provision here. Essentially a colonialist mindset, even though most of the source countries were never actually colonies. Breaking news - a lot of this labour is no longer necessarily available, or particularly cheap. But moving to a higher-skilled, higher wage economy isn't straightforward, and at least in the short term is likely to widen still further the gap between the high-earning, allegedly skilled (although sometimes you doubt it) middle classes, and the basic wage service providers. In a lot of industries, the 'high skill high wage' bit is going to be the people who design and manage the automation; the rest of us can get a day rate clearing up when the automation goes bang (which it will) or providing personal services to this new priesthood.  (The push in the public sector to make careers like nursing or the police graduate-only is of course an understandable attempt to ensure they end up on the privileged side of the new divide).

 

We've been here before: when Victorian England was the 'workshop of the world', you may not believe it but we were actually, in European terms, a high wage economy, and if you had any sort of skill, from millwright to coal hewer,  recessions aside you had 'never had it so good'. But there was a huge underclass of unskilled day labour. Compare the prospects of a riveter in a Birkenhead shipyard, and his cousin picking up work by the hour in the Liverpool docks.

 

Finally, and in a desperate attempt to wrangle this back to the 'freight by rail' theme, if multimodal freight is going to work at scale, we will need a lot of automation - both in the physical handling of containers etc to reduce transshipment times and costs, and in IT to get real-time co-ordination between fixed timetable rail, and the much more flexible but unpredictable road legs (including, for example, offering backloads to empty trucks that become available at short notice). Technically it is all do-able, and not grossly expensive, but only if a large part of the goods transport sector and its customers commit - like most networks, you can't really demonstrate the advantages in small scale pilot programmes. But should we nationalise rail and road freight under a National Freight Corporation to achieve this efficient and green nirvana? You decide!

 

 

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Please forgive me if I missed it being mentioned previously, but there is also the dismal 'just in time' logistics concept that has taken root.  As I understand it, warehouses no longer exist to hold buffer stocks of widgets.  As soon as a lorry-load of these is made, it is driven straight to the shop/ firm using them.  I remember vividly the television series 'The Factory' (with that irritating ex-green-grocer) about tea-bag manufacturing.  The tea-bags were packed, loaded into an artic., and driven off to a super-market who was about to run out of this line.  We are now seeing the consequences (and I am told it is to get worse in the next few years) of demolishing all these 'buffer store' warehouses, with interruptions to manufacturing meaning there is no 'slack' for customers to purchase.  The bean-counters realised warehouses cost money, so should be eliminated to increase short-term profits.

 

Railways are much more suited to flows to warehouses, I think, concentrating goods in distribution centres that are then delivered over each's 'region' for the firm.  Unless firms' distribution models are returned to the more Edwardian system as outlined by @Nearholmer , The accursed lorry will have the advantage.  As one who would love dearly to see the return of 'Speedlink', marshalling yards, and shunting 'cuts' of wagons, this is not going to happen with the 'free market' having to lower costs but not pay the environmental consequences.

 

I agree also with Nearholmer's remarks about people's pay, costs, and disposable income.  The politicians are scared of increasing people's basic costs back to the Victorian proportions of income because we have a low-wage economy, and we are all paying too much in rent or mortgages.  Housing costs have shot up as a proportion of income over the last fifty years.  As an aside, when I listen devotedly to Radio 4's 'The Food Programme' droning on about artisan food-makers of quality produce at three or four times the price of supermarket basics, I wonder what proportion of the people can afford to shop thus.  There is a reason why the poorer eat cheap bad food, and no amount of farmers' markets and twee stalls will solve this without addressing the underlying poverty of many in the U.K.

Edited by C126
Grammar.
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6 hours ago, black and decker boy said:

There do appear to be moves for some new short haul rail freight. Talk of a Hull/Immingham to Doncaster flow using piggyback wagons. Perhaps tapping into the unaccompanied trailer flows into the docks?

 

existing supermarket domestic freight flows continue and do grow slowly, eg.......

using swap bodies as well as containers.

One of the other issues of moving goods from road to rail is the woefully small UK railway loading gauge. Tesco for one have road/rail intermodal trailers, but they are rather low and therefore limited capacity, even compared to normal road trailers, but especially double deckers.

I know it's a Victorian legacy, but it's another clear & present handicap for UK Intermodal operations.

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In comparing an "Edwardian" situation with today, what Nearholmer's assessment missed out was the very great change that has taken place in the population, settlement and the types of economic activity.

 

Even comparing the present day with the 1930's, or post WW2 1950's, you have to take into account the much larger population (up more than 20m since 1931 and up more than 10m since 2001)  and the great changes in patterns of settlement and the workplace.

We now have a much more mobile and dispersed population.

With some exceptions, people are not concentrated in the centre of towns and cities to the same extent they were in days of old.

A sizeable proportion of the population have moved out beyond town and the suburbs, to satellite towns and villages and the surrounding areas of those towns and villages.

New communities have sprung up, or populations have mushroomed in existing, once quiet villages.

Neither are the places of work or the services (like shops) confined to the places they once were.

A lot of the large scale heavy industry has gone, or changed in nature and factories and other industrial facilities have scattered all over the place, along with modern warehousing and distribution centres.

 

Whether it's transporting foodstuffs, goods or other supplies to people, or moving around commercial loads and manufactured products, the patterns of transportation have changed.

The Victorian railway geography, laid down in a different world, simply doesn't cover or service large parts of the nations transport requirement any more; whether that's moving people or freight.

 

That's not to write off the role of the railways, or diminish the prospect of a revival in their role as a freight carrier, but it is just simply naive to assume we can wind the clock back to a different time and different set of economic criteria that no longer exists.

The notion that around 38% of existing lorry tonne/km could be suitable to move by rail, is pure fantasy. You'd be lucky to switch 5 - 10%.

Never mind the current lack of loading and handling facilities, the railway lines don't even exist and in many cases, never have.

 

There's also a question of simple logic.

It makes no sense in any way whatsoever, to enforce unnecessary extra processes, unneccessary inefficiencies, plus costly time and delay into transportation processes.

It's almost as daft as decreeing that all freight to Switzerland must go by sea.

Some people appear to suggest the economics are rigged against moving freight back onto rail, but that's just ignoring the reality and logic of the situation.

 

 

Right, that'll have p***** off a lot of you. :angel:

 

 

.

 

 

Edited by Ron Ron Ron
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As mentioned, most supermarkets send some goods by rail, but it only happens when enough goods is moving between the same origin and destination, and they are far enough apart that the economies of scale outweigh the cost of double handling.  As a rule of thumb, if the truck driver can deliver an item and get back within a shift, that will probably be what happens.  Hence containers from Felixstowe and Southampton go on rail to the Midlands and beyond, but not to the South East.  The "hub and spoke" model of supermarket distribution creates large volumes between the hubs, but any rail use is generally over long distances between rail-connected hubs, such as Daventry to central Scotland.  

 

This may change at the margin, due to factors such as drivers' wages (assuming we don't get autonomous trucks), increasing traffic congestion and (according to the Modern Railways article mentioned) the impossibility of a zero emission long range HGV.  One of more of these could tip a particular flow over from road to rail if the economics are fairly close currently - assuming the rail network has capacity carry it.  Several companies are also targeting parcels by rail, where a similar hub and spoke model may create enough volume over distance, with distribution by electric van meaning the "last mile" is actually a lot longer than that.  So we aren't going to see anything like the "Edwardian Model" of goods being trans-shipped to or from rail at nearly every stations.  

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It was interesting to seed the responses of different supermarkets to the issue: some saying that they are offering large sums to poach drivers, a few others, including Morrisons, saying that they are going to train drivers. I know where I would rather take my grocery business.

But in a way it gets back to a more fundamental issue, which is choices of careers by children leaving school. I wonder how many careers officers ever suggest HGV driving - or butchery, which also has a serious and increasing shortage of recruits They all suggest degrees in media studies or Masters in management, as far as I can see!

 (slightly cynical but I fear not far from the truth).

Jonathan 

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Talking to children about work they seem  to think that that manual labour is a dirty word and they all want to go to uni .Most youngsters in uni are doing degrees that will not be of use to the UK economy but the ones that go into aprentaships find that they go onto well paid jobs that often lead to self employment.Sadly  teachers push uni mainly because if a high number  of the children go to uni prospective parents are persuaded to send children there. I was at school in the fifties  and only the very best went on to uni and they had to work damn hard to get their degree which benifited the UK  .I  think we are in a downward spiral where we are going to have to allow visitors to the jobs we dont want to do.

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8 hours ago, lmsforever said:

Talking to children about work they seem  to think that that manual labour is a dirty word and they all want to go to uni .Most youngsters in uni are doing degrees that will not be of use to the UK economy but the ones that go into aprentaships find that they go onto well paid jobs that often lead to self employment.Sadly  teachers push uni mainly because if a high number  of the children go to uni prospective parents are persuaded to send children there. I was at school in the fifties  and only the very best went on to uni and they had to work damn hard to get their degree which benifited the UK  .I  think we are in a downward spiral where we are going to have to allow visitors to the jobs we dont want to do.

I have just finished a "civil engineering" degree at the old swansea metropolitan University now rebranded as uwtsd, and my course was complete rubbish with an emphasis on management and very little technical knowledge and very little maths, in fact I did no maths in the level 5 year at all! 

 

So I would have to agree with your statement, because I wouldn't trust myself to design a simple beam for a domestic dwelling opening, never mind anything else. And if most courses are similar in context then we really are doomed. 

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1 hour ago, rka said:

I have just finished a "civil engineering" degree at the old swansea metropolitan University now rebranded as uwtsd, and my course was complete rubbish with an emphasis on management and very little technical knowledge and very little maths, in fact I did no maths in the level 5 year at all! 

 

So I would have to agree with your statement, because I wouldn't trust myself to design a simple beam for a domestic dwelling opening, never mind anything else. And if most courses are similar in context then we really are doomed. 

As a civil engineer myself, your course content seems aimed squarely at contracting rather than design consultants. As such, it will be of great benefit to both the industry and U.K. plc.

 

my degree (mid 90s) was the opposite, all design theory & maths and nothing about project management, materials, environment or digital technology. In my contracting career, I’ve used very little of what I was taught.

 

Welcome to construction.

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I am afraid that you would have been better going to Swansea University which has a very high reputation in engineering, and was very good for engineering even 50 years ago when I studied maths there and it was the University College of Swansea. In those days of course the Metropolitan University didn't exist. We had a Teacher Training College and an Art School, if I remember correctly.

Anyway, back on topic. Today's announcement of a wonder new petrol makes me think that it will be even more difficult to get more use of the railways for passengers, let alone freight. To get freight back on the railways we need a shift in mindset putting environmental issues first and not lowest cost. All I can see from most of the politicians of all parties is posturing, especially when they think they can win votes. But I am told we get the politicians we deserve.

Jonathan

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Add a bit of glamour to the job ! 

There isn't any glamour to H.G.V  driving. When my brother had his license about 45 years ago he said to me the dream was driving down a nice long road in  France and stopping at a roadside cafe for lunch in the sunshine. When the reality was losing your load on a roundabout on a Friday night rush hour in the rain and running out of hours.

I tried it 20 years later and what he said was true. Never ever again, not even if they paid £40 per hour.

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2 minutes ago, SamThomas said:

There is certainly a case for some (none bulk, as in aggregate) goods to go by rail but it would need some thought about what to put the goods in/on.

 

Probably have to stick to what is now commonly used in the logistics industry which would rule out BRUTES.

BRUTES are long-gone. On PO traffic, they were replace by 'York' trollies, I believe. Nowadays, it would be some sort of wheeled cage pallet. I'm sure there'd be plenty of these about. The expensive bits are the hard-standing, and the system for transferring containers between modes.

I have seen a system used in France, where trailers use forks which slid sideways into slots in the sides of the container floor. They then lifted a few inches, and extended on to the adjacent wagon floor, whence they dropped the box on to the Twistlocks. The time between arriving with one box, and leaving with another, averaged about seven minutes, and was a one-man operation. The road access was unsurfaced, though some spent ballast and road planings had been used to fill the worst potholes.

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I wonder how much of this shortage is due to Online deliveries…

Weve stopped shopping and started getting it delivered.

 

Thats taken a lot of new van drivers, and Of course “Just Uber-roo”… maybe that money is better paid.

 

 

Whatever the solution, it can be solved with money….

paying higher wages makes things cost more and subsequently demand will fall until it self corrects… every extra £1 inflationary paid is also £1 less product produced that needs to be shipped.. so less lorries / drivers will be needed too.

 

The balance is to avoid a loss of confidence by the money markets and lead to a crash… to me the global demand is an artificial bubble created by covid…

 

if you need 100 widgets a year, and 2020’s widgets arrive a year late.. chances are you dont need 200 widgets in 2021, indeed you might find you can survive off 75 widgets from 2022 onwards.. so net loss is -125 widgets in 1 year and -25 thereafter.

 

if companies fail to recognise that, they could end up with 125 spare widgets in 2021 and growing stockpiles thereafter or worse.. hastened by delays they double down and order an extra 100… then they will really be in a mess.

 

To me Covid is ripe for market correction, its Dotcom bubble 2001 all over again… Dotcom bubble was a delay driven issue, too many IT skills and resources were a temporary distraction by the millenium bug, leading to skill shortages, driving up percieved demand for IT based product. After 2000.. they all came back, flooded the market where companies found the demand for IT driven markets wasnt as big as they thought but actually was fear of missing out..skills swamped the market, as the market wasnt ready it all collapsed.

 

This isnt a demand driven economy, its a delay driven one, is the shortage of HGV drivers a temporary distraction, once they delay is sated, there could be a lot of wastage.

 

Is the clue in the alphabet.. Austerity, Brexit, Covid..Depression ?

 

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23 minutes ago, adb968008 said:

I wonder how much of this shortage is due to Online deliveries…

Weve stopped shopping and started getting it delivered.

 

Thats taken a lot of new van drivers, and Of course “Just Uber-roo”… maybe that money is better paid

 

I doubt online has much to do with this.  The HGVs that brought the goods to the shops previously will now take (some of) them to distribution warehouses - there may be some move towards larger lorries to handle the greater volumes to fewer places, but there will be fewer of them.  

 

From the warehouses to the consumer is indeed all about vans of various sizes, but those drivers don't need a HGV license.  Anyone with one who was driving vans has probably switched to HGVs already unless there's some reason they can't do that.  

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32 minutes ago, Edwin_m said:

I doubt online has much to do with this.  The HGVs that brought the goods to the shops previously will now take (some of) them to distribution warehouses - there may be some move towards larger lorries to handle the greater volumes to fewer places, but there will be fewer of them.  

 

From the warehouses to the consumer is indeed all about vans of various sizes, but those drivers don't need a HGV license.  Anyone with one who was driving vans has probably switched to HGVs already unless there's some reason they can't do that.  

People need work.

They will migrate to jobs that pay better.

 

if HGV has high barriers and low salaries, of course people will drive a van instead… if they could ride a horse and cart and it pays better than a van, i’d reckon they’d switch to that too…

 

As side of blaming Europeans, and measley employers, wasnt some of this sudden shortage due to IR35 tax rules ?.. suddenly those drivers working for a 1 person company, who are totally subservient to their “employer” have been discovered for what it was.. a tax dodge ?

 

Several “man and van” deliveries aren't loyal to any one logistics company for work.. the “Just Uber-roos” certainly arent.. they deliver anything for anyone.,, making it much more IR35 attractive…but thats hard with a HGV.

 

What I find interesting is the emerging solutions, like hiring prisoners to pack meat… cheap temporary labour…

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-58303679

The army returning from Afghanistan could provide some logistics too i’d imagine… a Chinook can lift a container. :D

 

 

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4 hours ago, black and decker boy said:

As a civil engineer myself, your course content seems aimed squarely at contracting rather than design consultants. As such, it will be of great benefit to both the industry and U.K. plc.

 

my degree (mid 90s) was the opposite, all design theory & maths and nothing about project management, materials, environment or digital technology. In my contracting career, I’ve used very little of what I was taught.

 

Welcome to construction.

Haha, fair enough then

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On 30/08/2021 at 15:53, KeithHC said:

Now how many supermarkets are built next to railway lines or over them.

 

Morrison's (used to be Sainsbury's) occupied the site of the GWR station at Clevedon. And there is a Tesco Superstore south of the centre which is right next to the former trackbed... a good excuse to reopen the line. :)

 

One flow which caught my attention was the Tesco (?) swap bodies to Wick in Scotland. A good idea, however the execution was a bit absurd - a 66 for two container flats, very much an overkill. I always thought that it would have been better to, say, try  and involve ScotRail somehow in the affair. Modify the flats with passenger compatible brakes, then run them north of Inverness attached to a loco-hauled passenger train - a smaller diesel (say a 73), one 2nd class coach and the two flats tagged onto the back with the train doing the regular all stops run from Inverness. Either EW&S would provide the diesel and ScotRail the coach, or ScotRail would provide both with EW&S just tagging the flats behind at Inverness. Just daydreaming... :)

 

 

Cheers NB

 

 

 

 

 

 

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4 hours ago, corneliuslundie said:

I am afraid that you would have been better going to Swansea University which has a very high reputation in engineering, and was very good for engineering even 50 years ago when I studied maths there and it was the University College of Swansea. In those days of course the Metropolitan University didn't exist. We had a Teacher Training College and an Art School, if I remember correctly.

Anyway, back on topic. Today's announcement of a wonder new petrol makes me think that it will be even more difficult to get more use of the railways for passengers, let alone freight. To get freight back on the railways we need a shift in mindset putting environmental issues first and not lowest cost. All I can see from most of the politicians of all parties is posturing, especially when they think they can win votes. But I am told we get the politicians we deserve.

Jonathan

Unfortunately, I figured this out three years too late. 

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Listened to the radio this morning   with a company that is experiencing  delivery problems .They explained that the cost of containers has rocketed and there is a lack of ships to put them on plus ship to customer by road is very bad ,add that products are also in short supply so filling a container is a problem.The presenter suggested using UK based companies but he laughed and said there are none to use perhaps in europe but getting the goods here is problamatical .This person was talking about toys but said many industries are experiencing the same prolems. It was worrying to hear of the lack and pricing of containers the basic tools of world commerce if it continues the world is heading for serious problems.

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On the lorry driver side of things sometimes it moves back - someone I used to work with (high tech development - sure, I know, ironic considering my increasing dislike of high tech :) ) quit last year to drive. Last I heard from her she's getting an assessment for going forward to getting HGV training (only been on up to 7.5 tonne so far). And by all accounts she's rather happier in that job. Got a PhD in maths.

 

The "it's manual work" stigma needs to go. For some people it's a job they'll be happier doing, even if they're capable of other things.

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5 hours ago, adb968008 said:

People need work.

They will migrate to jobs that pay better.

 

if HGV has high barriers and low salaries, of course people will drive a van instead… if they could ride a horse and cart and it pays better than a van, i’d reckon they’d switch to that too…

Jobs that require more skills also pay better, especially when those skills are scarce.  Someone with an HGV licence has the scarce skill of being able to drive an HGV, so is unlikely to be driving a van unless their preference to do so outweighs the prospect of extra money.   Someone without an HGV licence may be driving a van, but they can't switch to an HGV without doing training and passing a test, which takes time and money.  They're not really much more of a solution to the HGV driver shortage than any random member of the public with a car driving license.  

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