Christopher Chope – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Christopher Chope on 2015-11-24.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that a sufficient supply of large goods vehicles drivers is available for the road haulage industry.

Andrew Jones

The Department is working with its motoring services agencies to reduce times and delays in obtaining a driving test appointment and medical licence renewals.

In order to reduce waiting times for LGV driving tests the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is currently recruiting examiners and is focusing its efforts particularly in areas where waiting times are higher. To date, DVSA has recruited 78 new driving examiners during 2015/16 with a further 65 either attending or are booked on to new entrant courses. DVSA has also offered posts to a further 41 potential examiners.

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) are now dealing with vocational applications with no declared medical condition within 5 working days. DVLA has also made some changes to improve the processing of applications where a driver has declared a medical condition. However processing these applications relies on the timeliness of third parties including medical professionals and drivers.

The latest estimates from the Labour Force Survey show that the number of HGV drivers employed across all sectors such as manufacturing and retail has continued to grow since the 259,000 low in 2013 to 299,000 drivers in 2015.