As I joined the back of the queue for our local petrol station (yes – I admit, I panic purchased too!) I was listening to a Radio 2 phone-in about the fuel crisis.
One aspect of the whole debacle which caught my attention was about working hours. Because as I sat in my car, with my engine running like everyone else and burning off valuable fuel so that I could top up, I heard that the rules on fuel tanker drivers’ hours had been temporarily relaxed to help the transport of supplies to filling stations.
Under EU rules, drivers are limited to nine hours on the road each day, but this was temporarily raised to 11 hours, after requests from the fuel supply industry.
So, let’s get this straight. EU health and safety laws have been carefully designed for the safety and well-being of each country’s population. Nine hours has clearly been agreed as the maximum amount of time it is safe before a driver shouldn’t be out on their shift anymore. But just because people are queuing for fuel someone decided that this ruling wasn’t that important after all and drivers are perfectly safe for eleven hours instead.
For me this makes a complete mockery of health and safety law if it can be changed with such ease.
What next? If a flu virus spreads across the nation, meaning vocational drivers are down on numbers, are we going to see the law changed so that unlicensed drivers can jump behind the wheels of our trucks and buses to keep the nation moving? OK, perhaps I’m being sensationalist but whilst everyone else may think this ruling demonstrates common sense, for me it’s the opposite.
In many quarters, health and safety law is seen negatively by businesses. It is seen as a nuisance, with many laws simply interfering with a company’s activities. I meet a lot of people who want to use our online systems only to “tick the health and safety box” and fail to see the point of it. This ruling gives ammunition to all those who feel that road safety isn’t important and damages the hard work that people in my profession carry out to persuade businesses of the relevance and importance of heath and safety law and how it should be treated positively, not negatively.
I, for one, believe that a driver’s safety and the safety of other road users is more important than people being able to top up their tanks. However it would appear that the Government’s reputation, and the need to get fuel to our pumps, is more important than a tired driver falling asleep at the wheel.
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