In-depth report: industry steps up training as Driver CPC deadline nears
The transport industry is on track to have enough drivers trained by the time the 10 September Driver CPC training deadline for ‘acquired rights’ lorry drivers comes around, providing current increases in the training rate can be sustained.
Driver CPC training hours undertaken rose from their December 2013 slump of 325,865, to two consecutive records of 675,636 in January and 794,760 in February.
Most professional LGV and PCV drivers are now engaged in Driver CPC acquisition, with over 720,000 having at least begun training at the end of February 2014.
Of these, 333,516 completed their 35 hours of training and have been awarded their Driver CPC qualification. New record levels of qualification through periodic training were set in January, when 28,192 cards were issued, and February when the number rose to 33,292 for the month.
Cards are also being awarded through initial examination at PCV and LGV licence acquisition at an average rate of over 1,800 a month. With 460,000 trucks, 36,000 buses and 20,000 coaches on UK roads making a total of 516,000 vehicles requiring a driver with a vocational licence, the current expanding training rates look set to achieve an adequate supply of qualified drivers by September.
The Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA), which oversees the Driver CPC scheme, has also downgraded its estimates of the total number of drivers requiring training from between 500,000 and 750,000 to between 425,000 and 675,000. It attributes this to a reversal of the decision that taking a vehicle for its annual test would require a driver who held the Driver CPC qualification.
Several factors prevent DVSA being more precise in its projections, which appear to be based on licences in issue rather than vehicles on the road. The fact is that it is unable to calculate the number of drivers who will require a Driver CPC.
There are many drivers who hold unused vocational ‘grandfather rights’ qual-ifications such as a C1 licence for vehicles up to 7.5 tonnes GVW, and an unknown number of individuals who hold a higher licence but are no longer working as drivers. There are also a substantial, but unknown, number of drivers from other EU states driving British-registered vehicles in both freight and passenger sectors.
Perhaps the best indication of the minimum requirement is the number of full LGV/ PCV licenced drivers who also hold a digital tachograph card (digital tachographs have been a compulsory fitment on new vehicles since 2006).
Data obtained from government sources indicates that there are 521,410 individuals who hold full LGV and/or PCV licences and have been issued with a digital tacho card: indicating that all these and more are at least participants in the Driver CPC system, even if they have yet to acquire the qualification.
However, it is likely that there are at least some bus drivers who do hold the DCPC qualification (because the large bus fleets have been very active in training their own staff) but do not have digital tachograph cards because they are not required to use them on stage bus operations.
While there are no statistics directly available on the number of drivers engaged in such work, there are 36,000 stage buses on the UK’s roads, with each one probably needing between one and three drivers, and not all such drivers will hold digital tachograph cards.
Training capacity in the industry continues to increase. In April 2013 there were 1,382 approved training centres offering 3,610 courses; by the end of February there were 1,459 training centres offering 3,904 courses.
It is likely that the Driver CPC legislation will have the most impact on a small sector of the industry: own-account operators running a small number of older vehicles of between 3.5 and 7.5 tonnes gross weight that are occasionally driven by a number of different individuals.
Such concerns tend not to think of themselves as being ‘in transport’ and pay little if any attention to changing legislation in the transport field.
So, while there are still some ‘known unknowns’ in the Driver CPC statistics, it appears that, providing the current momentum can be kept up, there will be no crisis level of driver shortage come the training deadline in September.
Nonetheless, Great Britain’s traffic enforcement agencies issued the latest in a series of warnings about the upcoming deadline as the six-month mark passed – reminding both lorry drivers and their employers that failing to meet the Driver CPC training requirements carries the risk of fines of up to £1,000, or even the loss of livelihood should traffic commissioners decide to suspend drivers’ or operators’ licences.
DVSA chief executive Alastair Peoples commented: “Britain’s roads are among the safest in the world and one of the ways we aim to keep them so is by encouraging all drivers to keep their skills up to date. This is particularly important for professional drivers.”
He continued: “DVSA enforcement officers already routinely check the Driver CPC status of professional drivers. After the deadline they’ll be able to check whether ‘acquired rights’ lorry drivers have completed their training or are driving illegally. Not being aware of Driver CPC is not an excuse for drivers or operators.”
Joan Aitken, traffic commissioner for Scotland and lead commissioner for the Driver CPC scheme, added: “This is a critical time for the HGV industry. Driver CPC is not an optional extra – it is a must.
“The conduct of drivers will be under the spotlight and vocational licence holders may face sanctions, including suspension.
“Operators could also find themselves before commissioners if there are issues around the circumstances in which a driver was working without the driver qualification card (DQC), or failed to produce it.”
She warned: “Our message on this has always been clear – don’t risk your livelihood.”
What the trainers say
Derek Broomfield, chairman of Essex-based Novadata, told Transport Operator that his company’s Driver CPC training operation is: “Really, really busy. It started in January, and we are now having to turn people away. We can only train 60 at a time in our own building, and we are training six days in a row.
“Our drivers’ hours course is still the most popular… We have one customer who four years ago booked all his drivers to go on it in the first week of January for every year, as he can then provide proof to VOSA if needed that his drivers have been recently trained in the subject.”
Mr Broomfield is concerned that the current boom in training will not last beyond November, as only a minority of operators seem to take a structured approach.
“We’ve got lots of people now doing five days in a row, but wouldn’t it be better to do one day a year? Seven hours in a year is really not that long.
“We are quite unusual in that only 25 per cent of our trainees are self-funded drivers: but we get a lot of company business through our tachograph analysis work.”
Trev King, a Driver CPC tutor at Tryo Training in Skipton, reports that his organisation is also very busy.
“By mid-March we were fully booked until almost May. There are a lot of small operators and individual drivers who have only recently finally realised that they are going to have to do it.
“We have also had about six PCV drivers coming to us ‘late’. They were all re-entering the industry after either doing another job, coming home from a long time abroad outside the EU or were returning to employment after having had their disability benefit stopped.”
Martin Garrity, a director of QC Driver Training of Oxfordshire, is concerned that, while things may be picking up for most training providers, there are still those at the fringe of the industry who are either unaware of what’s required, or still thinking that it can be put off.
“Are we doing enough to access the driver who – effectively – works from home and who vaguely knows about the Driver CPC and is thinking ‘I’ll get around to that later/next week/next month/oh my God, it’s August!’”
Laura Nelson, operations director of RTITB, reports that members of its Master Driver CPC Consortium enjoyed a very busy February. The number of drivers undergoing training at its near 200 members’ 300 sites was up nearly 36 per cent from the same month in 2013 to 9,500, with the level of delivery continuing into March.
Deborah Boyle, course development manager at Barry Training Services in South Wales, reports that, since the beginning of the year, the demand for Driver CPC has increased dramatically.
“We are continually adding new course dates to meet the demand,” she said.
“We are also putting more instructors through the RTITB Master Driver CPC periodic training delivery day to help with the demand.
“In the initial phase, some providers were charging approximately £75 – £100 per person per course which wasn’t encouraging drivers to take up the qualification.
“We reduced our prices to encourage drivers to take up the training and believe we are still very competitive with our costs.
“Since the start of Driver CPC, industry are telling us they’re looking for more value when taking this qualification and want courses which meet their particular needs such as ADR, Emergency First Aid for Drivers, Manual Handling to name just a few which we offer to address this.
“More drivers are looking to attend courses that they feel will be beneficial to them rather than sit any course just to gain the hours, the majority of drivers also feel the courses have been worthwhile.
“We still on occasion encounter confusion over exemptions and who needs the qualification. For instance, some thought the transport manager’s CPC would cover them for the Driver CPC.”
“It’s getting busier all the time,” said Andrew Wood, operations director of Viamaster Training in Castleford, near Leeds. “We’ve been in Driver CPC training since 2009 and it did get off to a very slow start.
“Things started to pick up in 2012, which is when we started running full courses over five consecutive days. We started off with one of those a month, which we have later increased to two, and we are still running our Saturday one-day courses too.
“But since coming back after Christmas we have increased the five-day courses again: we are now running up to three a month, and I could conceivably fill more.
“It’s a mixture of individual and company bookings. Individual drivers have now realised they have got to get something done, and we anticipate further demand – so much so that our trainers cannot book their holidays from June onwards.
“We are seeing the small own-account fleets that run four or five 7.5-tonne vehicles finally realising that this applies to them, and they are already booking courses for July and August.”
Another major source of custom is the Job Centre!
“Drivers returning to the industry now won’t get jobs without at least some DCPC training, so we get referrals straight from Job Centre Plus. Our own transport company won’t take on drivers unless they have recorded at least two modules of training, and most others are the same. We do still get drivers turning up with no training recorded who expect a job though.”
Viamaster has actually changed its own recruiting policy, and is now, unusually, no longer demanding two years’ previous experience before taking on artic drivers.
“We find that the newly-qualified drivers who have obtained the Driver CPC through examination are actually a good bet. They don’t bring any baggage with them, and are willing to listen and to do things our way.”
Mr Wood is interested to see what happens in the Driver CPC training field after September.
“With the bus industry we certainly had an over-run through September, and we also had seasonal drivers who had been driving coaches in the previous summer who came to us for training in November – December, but it has been quiet on the bus front since then.
“We expect to see a spike in truck drivers lasting until November, and for it to be quiet after that, although we do expect to be training an increasing number of unemployed drivers who are returning to the industry.
“Our main drive is to encourage companies to take a more orderly approach to training. Sending a driver on a five-day £300 course after September will easily end up costing his employer £1,000 if he has to either take a truck off the road or hire a qualified driver to fill in the week for the untrained one.”
Vicky Ridings-Williams, proprietor of Gatewen Training in North Wales, said she first noticed in acceleration in demand as far back as September, when a week-long course sold out.
“Then I took lots of bookings over Christmas for the New Year, we are filling both full-week and Saturday courses, and have bookings as far ahead as August.
“We had a bit of an eye-opener as to what the situation would be last summer with the bus companies. Although we are primarily a truck trainer I was asked if I could help a bus company and ended up doing six weeks of solid training for them.”
She attributes part of the increased demand as coming from a decision to hold prices at £60 and not profiteer from a spike in demand. “I’m hoping that this will pay back in terms of long-time customer loyalty.”
She expects the current peak to last until December: “I’m still collecting waifs and strays from the bus industry,” she points out.
Gatewen is getting inquiries for periodic training from drivers who actually need to obtain the initial qualification because they passed their tests after the Driver CPC’s inception.
“A lot of them are ex-army, and don’t realise that they have been driving unqualified,” she recounts. “The good thing is that as we are primarily a driving school, we can put them through modules two and four of the truck driving test, and even with instruction it’s cheaper than doing five blocks of Driver CPC training. Unfortunately many candidates find module two particularly tough.”
Like other trainers spoken to by Transport Operator, Ms Ridings-Williams is finding that many own-account operators in the 3.5 – 7.5 tonne sector are only just realising the implication of the Driver CPC and what they are going to have to do: “I recently spoke to one with 35 drivers, and said he’d never heard of it!”
She also shares the view that, next time around, operators are going to have to take a more structured approach to periodic training.
“Some of the larger operators knew all about it, but decided to leave drivers to sort it out for themselves…I don’t think they’ll make that mistake again,” she said.
Looking at the situation post- September, Novadata’s Derek Broomfield anticipates a major shake-out in the sector.
“Last year we were very busy with bus and coach drivers across the PCV deadline, but we only train five or six bus drivers a week now. I can anticipate up to half the current number of training providers dropping out of the business in the next couple of years.
Mr Broomfield raised two other concerns: “We get quite a lot of drivers who tell us that they know of other drivers and employers who still maintain that they are not going to do Driver CPC training; particularly in the sub-7.5 tonne own-account sector.
“And we’ve had a small number, so far, of Bulgarian drivers turn up for training with a very poor command of English. We know they can’t be taking in what we are doing, but it’s a qualification by attendance course.”
He concludes with a final appeal to operators to provide structured Driver CPC training for their drivers.
“We know that VOSA is looking for a systematic approach to training when it audits operators: it’s part of the compliance process. They are not impressed by operators who leave it to the last minute or where drivers have done the same course five times for five days in a row.“
