Petrol Buying

Indeed. Poor sods get caught up in it trying to earn a living!!

 

Why are there huge driver shortages in France? Did they Frexit on the quiet?

 

His name was Vidkun, not Les.

 

One of the truest things you have ever said.

 

Foreigners leaving has nothing to do with panic buying. The shortage of drivers exists regardless of Brexit. It is entirely fair to say that it has more to do with fear being stirred up by the media, causing people to fill up their tanks when they wouldn't usually need too, creating queues and ultimately, a glut on the available fuel. Even if we had all the drivers we needed, the ridiculous panic buying would be affecting availability through road blockages and over consumption/purchasing.

Welcome to the unnecessary effects of a "project fear".

 

Brexit has nothing to do with the shortages of drivers apparently.

In other news, Brexit has seen "cheap foreign workers" return home and the subsequent shortages of labour will see pay and conditions improve.

Personally I believe, like most of the haulage industry, that Covid and Brexit have made a bad situation considerably worse. Hopefully the chaos we have seen over the last few days will focus minds into finding solutions for the lack of HGV drivers rather than people engaging in "I told you so" Brexit bickering that solves nothing.

 

'Project Fear' was supposed to be easily and practically dismissed as ludicrous. Britain was going to boldly sort out all its own issues with clear leadership, strong governance and make everything better than it had ever been before. Britain would be in a position to respond more nimbly, more cleverly to the challenges of the modern world. It would be able to spot problems a mile off and – freed from bureaucracy (apparently) – be in a position to be one step ahead of everyone else by dint of sheer brilliance and ingenuity.

But it seems quite a lot of people have succumbed to 'Project Fear' because all our lives depend on complex infrastructure and supply chains run by people who understand what they are doing. All it takes to bring Britain to an embarrassing, shuddering halt is a 24-hour news cycle. Why didn't people simply go, "Nah, this is just Project Fear," and refrain from queuing at the fuel stations to fill buckets and pint glasses with unleaded? (That's a rhetorical question).

Now we're in the phase of blaming the media (a claim that does have some validity in this case because some of the coverage has been ludicrous). But, again, we blame the media for this but don't question what else the media has said over the past two decades that might have been a bit, well, sensationalist and leading. Bendy bananas, perhaps? Next – if it's not happened already – will be to blame the public sector, probably the DVLA, ignoring that lots of the bits of the public sector that fail first are the bits that are privatised.

 

The reviews of working for HOYER (one of the 'main' companies supplying tankers & drivers) make very interesting unsurprising reading:

https://uk.indeed.com/cmp/Hoyer/reviews?fcountry=ALL

 

Nice try, but they are short of nearly double the number we are and they aren’t queuing for hours at the pumps.

 

And yet over your head.

 

Interesting that in their last statement of accounts in the risk section, they mentioned Covid in that they have been able to take advantage of the furlough schemes (so wasn't a big issue), but with brexit there was no mention of any risk due to lack of drivers. It was as if they hadn't considered what everyone was thinking.

 

No. But I might suggest that the best part of an entire forum harbours at least a certain amount of bemusement at, what appears to be, a complete lack of self awareness on your part.

Like I say, either stop insulting people, implying they are racists and making your own prejudices abundantly clear; or stop complaining about YOURSELF.

 

It's almost as if people are retro-engineering their back story to blame Brexit.

Mind you, if they did consider Brexit to be a risk, then the true risk for them was failing to make their own plans over these last six years. I think it is unfair to blame the Government for that lack of foresight on the part of the employers.

 

Please don’t blame my wuvverly Brexit. It will come good one day.

 

Has this gone over my head, or has the fact that France's shortage is only half that of ours gone over yours.

The argument that Brexit was somehow to blame would be entirely redundant if our shortages were only half those experienced in the EU.

You can't have it both ways. And sorry if I have missed something.

 

No you didn’t miss anything. I meant to write half of ours, my error. Estimates are that France needs 50k drivers. We need 100k.

Does rather change the meaning.

And sure, the argument is not that Europe is perfect and we are not.

 

I'm still not clear what Brexit is being blamed for/credited with. Is it causing the shortage of drivers and the pressure on firms to increase wages and improve conditions or not?

On one hand I'm being told the labour shortages are nothing to do with Brexit and then I'm being told reducing the reliance on foreign workers to drive up wages is cited as one of the primary reasons to Brexit!

Ultimately it's irrelevant. Brexit is done and both these contrary arguments are pointless.

 

Government are the project managers for the entire country. They set the rules of the game. They nudge and steer behaviour of corporations and individuals. They decide and regulate knowing that a tax cut here or a rule change there will have an effect. They are absolutely responsible for creating the conditions for business and society to thrive or wither. That's their entire raison d'être, to govern. You can't absolve them of responsibility just because it's inconvenient.

As for Brexit, the 'rules' of the game were revealed far too late for most companies to even know what they would be mere weeks before their implementation. In some industries the impact has been softened by pushing the full implementation of those rules a bit further down the road. One of the most insane arguments on the eve of actually exiting the EU was that people had had 'four years to prepare' when the detail of the 'oven-ready' deal had still not been made available. Unfortunately, the simplism of slogan-driven politics won and then the people who actually knew what the implications would be were forced to adapt. Now we face the price of those adaptations.

 

Instead of HS2, why don't we come up with some way of whizzing freight from one end of the country to the other? Dedicated freight electric rail lines? Monorail? Automated if you want. What can the inventors come up with?

An integrated transport policy with road transporting only done for the first and last few miles from the terminal depots. A plan to move forward into the future rather than keep 20th century juggernauts chugging on using engine technology which hasn't fundamentally changed since its invention in 1860.

I always argue that capitalism holds back the human race's development and the fact that nobody at all as far as I know has called for anything other than more HGVs demonstrates very well the lack of imagination and possibilities to make sensible forward-looking decisions in everyone's best interests.

 

Saw this today.



Big oof.

 

You are talking about a socialist utopia I am afraid.

Yes, the Government must facilitate industry and trade, but what you are speaking of is tantamount to nationalisation of industry and commerce. You can blame them, but it is not the fault of the Government if businesses choose not to act.

There was nothing to stop employers from improving pay and condition for drivers to attract them over the last few years, and warnings of what would happen have been aggressively made since 2015, or earlier. If you believe the Government have stood in their way, of making such improvements, please say how so.

Indeed, the Government have removed the one thing that enabled those companies to 'abuse' their employees, as the above quoted driver described, by implementing Brexit and removing their access to cheep EU labour, which was used to keep wages and conditions down.

The companies had six years to mitigate the effects of Brexit, but instead chose to gamble on there not being a global pandemic which would cause a shortage of drivers that would further exacerbate the shortage they propogated by failing to act. Instead, they continued to 'abuse' their employees, and put the the 'just in time' abomination that we rely on in complete jeopardy.

 

I agree with a minimum limit of petrol rather than a maximum, as a minimum would deter those with more than enough from going to fill up unnecesarily.

I was talking to a retired fireman at the school gate today, I suggested that petrol stations should have banned people from filling jerry cans up, then people would have been unable to buy more than their vehicles can hold. He was saying there was already a two can limit for petrol but no limit for diesel in law, anyone who has more than two cans of petrol needs a petrol licence and of course is a fire hazard, they can't be stored in your garage for example.

 

Well it looks like the feeding frenzy is finally slowing and things are starting to get back to normal:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-58724332

As predicted, once people had filled up demand would slow and supply is starting to catch up.

What madness next I wonder...

 

Seems a bit arbitrary, to be honest.

The petrol is just as flammable in a lawnmower as it is in a can.

 

I'm ok as I've got my own supplier:

 

Stick them on eBay.

 

To be fair to the Hauliers not an easy one for them to solve. Margins in that market are down at around 2-3% in a large number of cases. They are already offering 50%+ higher wages to recruit drivers, and trying to pass on the additional costs, which can make them uncompetitive. Very easy to say just pay more, but if the haulier down the road doesn’t follow suit, you lose business. Training drivers has become more difficult during Covid as test centres were closed, and there is a large backlog to get new drivers trained. People saying they have treated their staff badly by only paying their staff £10-11/hr and they should have been paying significantly higher, are we also applying that to all other sectors that pay those type of wages. The government offered a pathetic wage increase to the healthcare workers, do they not also deserve a 50%+ wage increase?

 

If it’s a detached garage you’re fine. I wouldn’t store it in a one attached to my house personally.