Letters: Why should a foreign lorry-driver want to apply for a visa lasting only six months?

SIR – The idea that allowing 5,000 HGV drivers to come in from Europe for six months is going to solve the distribution problem shows how little imagination the British Government has.

We have a shortage of between 80,000 and 100,000 drivers – so until replacements are recruited and trained, that’s how many visas we need to offer.

Visas are for six months. There are similar shortages on the Continent, where pay and conditions are more attractive than in Britain, so who is going to uproot themselves, pay for a visa and find accommodation, only to be sent home six months later?

It will take longer than six months to recruit and train replacement drivers. A more reasonable visa would be for two years.

Keith Appleyard
West Wickham, Kent

SIR – Urgently want more HGV drivers from overseas? Then just announce that a few petrol stations are closing, and – bingo! – the great British public oblige.

Roger Montague
Bushey Heath, Hertfordshire

SIR – As I read of empty supermarket shelves and petrol station queues in Britain, here in southern Portugal, where I am currently on holiday, milk and other everyday items are conspicuously absent from the local store shelves.

Panic buying and a lack of HGV drivers are clearly not peculiar to Britain.

Ursula Starkie
Almancil, Faro, Portugal

SIR – Well done, Boris Johnson, for standing up for the wages of lorry drivers.

People have had enough of cheap labour, mainly from EU countries. We need British jobs for British workers in a high-paid Brexit economy. Then watch Britain flourish.

Geoffrey Brooking
Havant, Hampshire

SIR – I was saddened by the first-person article written by Adam Eastwood on being a HGV driver (September 25).

At the peak of the Covid pandemic I had to go into work, being a nurse. If London transport drivers had not gone to work and HGV drivers had not delivered the food I was able to buy from M&S after work, I would not have been able to carry out my professional duties and look after my patients.

As a country, we all, I feel, need to step back and see how everyone in every walk of life needs one another to get this great country back on its feet.

So it is sad that Mr Eastwood ended up leaving his profession. It requires skill to drive those enormous vehicles.

Mary Moore
London E2

SIR – Isn’t it strange that ministers can ask retired HGV drivers to come out of retirement to help with the current delivery problems? Would it be possible for the same ministers to ask their own staff at DVLA (and other Government bodies) to return to normal working so that we can get HGV licences renewed and returned ?

Mike Metcalfe
Butleigh, Somerset

SIR – If DVLA staff working from home are barred from processing licences, and a backlog has built up (report, September 25), what work are these civil servants doing at home?

Nicholas Moate
Falmouth, Cornwall

SIR – I am surprised our leaders have not come up with the batty idea of driverless lorries as a solution to the lorry driver crisis. Interestingly, they have not even mentioned electric lorries (although they also require drivers). I wonder why.

Professor Bryan Woodward
Loughborough, Leicestershire

SIR – Please report a shortage in alcohol supply. We could all do with a good party.

Stuart Buxton
Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire

Three Rs foundation

SIR – Sir Anthony Seldon’s mealy-mouthed letter (September 23), which offered half-hearted praise of the work of the retiring schools minister Nick Gibb, suggests an ignorance of the task that he took on 10 years ago.

Some 18 per cent of 16-year-old school-leavers were functionally illiterate then, and almost 30 per cent functionally innumerate. He identified the fact that most primary schools were teaching these subjects badly and set out to put things right. Millions of children owe their success at school directly to his determined efforts.

It is wrong to suggest that Mr Gibb was ever a block to education reform. On the contrary, he saw that the right path for young people to social mobility, to technical skills, and to the creativity that Sir Anthony wants to see, indubitably begins with the ability to read and write fluently. The country owes Nick Gibb a great debt.

Lord Lingfield (Con)
London SW1

Better drugs than fish

SIR – The Lord Advocate has de facto decriminalised possession of Class A drugs such as heroin and cocaine. But those who possess dangerous drugs had better not be caught with a dead salmon or sea trout in their possession.

Taking dead salmon from a river, perhaps a fish that was killed by a seal, is a serious criminal offence, which always leads to criminal prosecution, with a fine of up to £2,500.

What a strange country Scotland is, where dead salmon are afforded the full protection of the criminal law, but communities consumed with violence, drug gangs and record drug deaths have seen their criminal protection withdrawn by the Lord Advocate.

Jim Stewart
Musselburgh, East Lothian

World beyond satire

SIR – Michael Deacon is right to point out the satirist’s problem of reality outstripping fiction. My late father, Michael Wharton, often ruminated on the difficulty he faced trying to write the Way of the World column when so much he satirised had become reality.

He did, however, write as Peter Simple for nearly five decades. Much to his amusement, his column in later years appeared alongside the obituaries. His last column appeared only a week before his death in 2006.

Jane Wharton
Marlborough, Wiltshire

Sparse weddings

SIR – While weddings happily resume across the nation, it is worth noting that some councils are using Covid restrictions apparently as a way to cut costs.

Cambridgeshire County Council insists that only nine guests may accompany us for our register-office wedding, and also that my father is not allowed to walk me into the room to give me away. It even refuses to let any guests use the loo at the register office.

Bianca Abulafia
London SW6

Cambridge concern

SIR – Five professors and pro-vice-chancellors (Letters, September 24) assert that the claims in the articles by Ross Clark and Madeline Grant about “Stephen Toope’s Cambridge” are “extraordinary”.

It is interesting, therefore, to note that they refute not a single one of those claims.

Instead of deploying the reason and argument that one might expect of senior Cambridge academics, they make an appeal to the emotions.

I fear their letter will reinforce rather than allay readers’ concerns as to what is happening to this fine university.

David Monteath
London E5

Medieval pews burnt

SIR – We feel for the parishioners of Thurcroft, South Yorkshire, whose church is beset by mould. Our affliction is dry rot. We don’t yet know the full extent of the bill we face, but £50,000 is at the very low end of current estimates, and delay is not an option. We feel similarly desperate.

Ours is a Grade I-listed small village church – St Peter and St Paul, in the Gordano valley, Somerset. Already we have had to burn six medieval pews and the wooden floor beneath. About 2,000 Victorian tiles have had to be destroyed. We are also the anxious custodians of the only surviving psalm-singing gallery in use in Europe – it’s wooden.

Our congregation is few and ageing fast. We too would welcome help and financial support from anywhere, but, as your report shows, neither Church nor Government is able to meet the extent of our material needs.

John G Bridges
Churchwarden

Ian Robinson
Treasurer, parochial church council
Weston-in-Gordano, Somerset

The highly skilled toolmaker knew his worth

SIR – Toolmakers have been in the news, thanks to Sir Keir Starmer’s father.

I worked for a large metal presswork company in the 1960s and toolmakers were some of the best paid employees, many earning more than their senior managers.

It was a very skilled job commanding a high hourly rate because of supply and demand. The toolmakers, by choice in the main, were hourly paid rather than salaried, so that with enhanced overtime rates they could earn considerable amounts. The salaried did not have that choice.

Incidentally, a standard working week was 48 hours, and it was not unusual to book 60 hours a week.

James Rann
London SW1

SIR – I read that Sir Keir Starmer intends to save £1.7 billion for the taxpayer by removing charitable status from private schools.

However, that will presumably result in higher school fees and more parents sending their children to state schools.

So the saving will be eaten up by extra costs on what already appears to be an overloaded education system. Would not it make more sense to allow tax relief on school fees, so as to encourage more pupils out of the state system and relieve some of the burden of overcrowded schools?

John Pearn
South Molton, Devon

SIR – I struggled to read Sir Keir Starmer’s essay, but one phrase impressed me as newly minted in the pile of old, dull cliche: “But the arc of history will not bend towards us unless we force it to.”

What does this mean? Is it a neo-Leninist rallying cry or a darkly Francoist threat?

Michael Downing
Sheffield, South Yorkshire

Bowlmen, fieldmen and battership

SIR – I am no cricketer and so really do not mind what the person wielding a bat is called (Letters, September 25).

However, I see that a great authority on the sport, Henry Blofeld, describes Don Bradman in The Oldie as the “most successful batter of them all”.

At sea I hope the woke brigade will not now force me to call the helmsman the helmer.

Ewen Southby-Tailyour
Ermington, South Devon

SIR – Surely we should now refer to the great cricketer as Don Bradder.

Bob Massingham
Bicester, Oxfordshire

SIR – I have noticed that there is a female member of the team collecting our refuse. Should she be referred to as a lady binman, a binperson, or a binner?

Steve Haynes
Sidmouth, Devon

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