Spalding-area MP John Hayes says Brexit can't be blamed for everything... and a Gosberton Risegate resident hits out at faulty Spalding car park ticket machines
Here's two interesting letters from this week's Lincolnshire Free Press...
You can’t blame everything on the Brexit vote
Mr Barfoot’s letter in the October 26 edition of the Free Press warrants a comprehensive reply.
It is axiomatic we are facing significant pressures from the HGV driver shortage, but to present this as a symptom of Brexit ignores the fact that Germany is short of some 65,000 drivers, while in Poland the shortage is almost 124,000. If anything, our membership of the EU masked, rather than solved, the long standing recruitment problem facing our haulage industry.
Having talked to many of Lincolnshire’s hauliers, I brought together a meeting between some of them and the Department for Transport at which firms made abundantly clear that the salient issue lies with the suspension of delegated examiner training, the speed and efficiency of DVLA administration, as well as regulation which unnecessarily obstructs and delays the system of HGV licensing.
Root and branch reform is needed to tackle these challenges if we want to both significantly increase the number of HGV licences issued and make a career in logistics more attractive for new and existing drivers.
More must be done to facilitate those dutiful firms willing to do their part in training the next generation of haulers, and to provide the roadside facilities and other terms and conditions of work which will inspire further generations.
I began this work, as the sector knows, when I was a Minister in the Department for Transport. Positive first steps are, at last, under way to cut DVLA red tape, with the aim to increase HGV driving tests by up to 61,000 each year, and we are already seeing a 300 per cent increase in the number of HGV provisional licence applications.
With Brexit, and the opportunity it brings to “make our own UK rules and laws”, in Mr Barfoot’s words, we now have the opportunity to reform the sector to build a more sustainable domestic HGV workforce that recognises the value of the work they do.
However, responsibility also lies with supermarkets who refuse to recognise the true value of the haulage sector. It is time for those profit-hungry corporate retailers to step up to the mark and pay a fair price for the carriage of the goods they sell.
How ironic then that Mr Barfoot – who, by the way, I know and respect – should ignore the extraordinary post-Brexit behaviour of those on the Continent, exemplified by the appalling conduct of the French on fishing rights.
In South Holland and the Deepings, three quarters of voters in the referendum backed Brexit, and the vast majority of decent people who didn’t have honourably respected the outcome. Yet there are still those who refuse to accept the 2016 decision, and, out of a lingering disdain for that democratic decision, blame every imaginable woe on Brexit; I hope and trust that Mr Barfoot is not one of them.
Sir John Hayes, MP
via email
Ticket machine is ‘daylight muggery’!
I don’t know if anyone else has been having problems with the car park ticket machine in Vine Street, Spalding, but just lately it’s been extorting cash out of me and not printing the correct amount on the ticket – eg £2 paid (for three hours) and £1.40 printed (meaning one hour).
I have written to South Holland District Council, asking them to check this machine for faults. But, in the meantime, I hope your readers might be amused by the poem I have written about my experience.
Daylight Muggery
Why, oh why, does it have to be me
Who gets mugged by a car park machine?
That’s the third time this week, so I think you’ll agree
That it’s bordering on the obscene
Its hunger for coins, it would appear,
Has led it to its life of crime.
Its demands to be fed goes up a gear
As soon as I put in mine
“More coins, more coins,” it screams at me
But fails to register the amount.
As I search in my pockets desperately,
I wonder if this machine can’t count
When the ticket spews out (most begrudgingly)
Well, surprise, surprise, I’ve been done.
I’ve fed enough in for an hour – times three,
Yet the ticket’s insisting just one!
What can I do? My hands are tied.
“The council won’t believe me,” I murmur.
They’ll stick up for their precious machine that’s lied –
In that, they’ve a nice little earner!
Gladys Breakspear
Gosberton Risegate