Hello, I’m Hilary and you’re listening to an Adept English podcast, designed to help
you learn to speak English fluently. I love the English language, and I help hundreds
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Hi there and welcome to this podcast from Adept English.
Sometimes, in order for you to practise your English understanding on everyday subjects,
I do a podcast on the news – or on an item, a story in the news, either in the UK or somewhere
else in the world. It’s something topical – that’s fun to do. And even if you’re
listening to this podcast sometime later – whatever I’m talking about might be past history,
but it’s still useful to you, from the point of view of vocabulary! I make sure that you’re
learning all kinds of vocabulary that you will need if you’re going to become fluent
in English. And I also make it personal – it’s about my experience, what I’ve noticed,
my opinion. And I think sometimes this makes it more interesting – people like a personal
element! And if it keeps you listening to our English language podcasts for longer,
then that’s got to be good for your English and good for Adept English at the same time!
And if you’d like to download lots of our podcasts, to help your learning, go to our
website at adeptenglish.com and buy one of our podcast download bundles – you’ll
be really glad you did this – lots of lovely English language listening.
So here goes for today. Something that’s a concern in the UK at the moment – and
I’m not sure whether it might be the case in other places in the world? The UK is starting
to have problems with supply and transportation. And it seems to be a growing problem.
So in the UK, we are very lucky and our systems for the supply of food and essential items
– and probably non-essential items as well and our services - well, they’re all usually
quite good. We’re not used to shortages, we’re not used to having to wait for things.
A ‘shortage’, SHORTAGE means when something is ‘in short supply’ meaning that there’s
‘not enough of it’. We’re not used to having shortages of things we want to buy
here – and we’re used to our services being good. So if we want to ‘buy a service’,
we expect it to be good service. And even when it’s our public services – that’s
the ones, the services that the state, the government if you like, provide, we expect
those services to be efficient too.
So the first thing I noticed, and this is a small inconvenience I know – I pay for
what’s known as a ‘green bin’. If you’ve listened to Adept English podcasts for a while,
you’ll know that I’m quite a keen gardener. I like to garden – and therefore I’m generating
what we might call ‘green waste’ – so that’s all the material from my garden that
I want to throw away. It might be grass cuttings, leaves, dead plants. So I pay for a special
‘green bin’, which I can fill, full of garden waste material and the council – that’s
local government here – they send round a lorry once a fortnight to empty the ‘green
bin’. Well, my green bin has not been emptied for some weeks now. And the reason? The company
that runs the scheme has not got enough drivers for the trucks. Drivers are in short supply
in the UK, especially lorry and truck drivers.
Since then, the news has been talking about how there may be more shortages in shops.
The whole system that delivers food into our shops and supermarkets is starting to be a
problem here, because of a shortage of what are called HGV drivers. HGV stands for ‘Heavy
Goods Vehicle’ – and an HGV driving licence means that you’ve had special training to
drive a big truck or a lorry. It’s thought to be partly as a result of Brexit that there’s
now a shortage of HGV drivers in the UK – but also not enough people doing this type of
work because well, the terms and conditions aren’t that great. And this problem is even
starting to affect the delivery of fuel, of petrol and diesel to our petrol stations.
So as soon as this is in the news, it creates more of a problem because of course, everyone
goes to the petrol station to fill up their car. And yes, I’m guilty – I went this
morning too to fill up my car with petrol and I queued along the road at our local petrol
station. The public transport (that means the bus) where I live isn’t very good, so
I have to use my car if I want to go anywhere. Of course, I don’t want to be stuck at home
with no petrol in my tank – and that’s how everyone around here was feeling too – hence
why there was a queue at the petrol station. I’ve looked since and now there seems to
be no petrol at all in the petrol station.
Apparently BP petrol stations have had to close. Last month MacDonalds ran out of milkshake
for a time and Nandos had to close because...well, there was no chicken – and they don’t
really serve anything else, I don’t think! All of this was apparently down to supply
chain and a lack of drivers.
Well, our lovely Transport Secretary, Grant Shapps has been interviewed on the news and
was reassuring everybody that there ‘isn’t a problem’. He was saying that it’s not
a problem of supply – the petrol is in the refinery. The problem is definitely one of
there being not enough drivers. Apparently the ‘haulage industry’ – that’s HAULAGE
– that means the industry around transportation of goods, of products on lorries – the haulage
industry in the UK is short of 100,000 drivers. Terms and conditions are not great – it’s
an uncomfortable, tiring and difficult job – and the rate of pay has not been good
enough. Many lorry drivers in the UK are 55 years or older – and many more are leaving
the profession each month than join. So this is a problem.
There have been calls mainly from the supermarkets and food distributers for drivers with HGV
licences to be added to the list of jobs, the list of occupations for which immigration
restrictions post-Brexit don’t apply. And in response the UK government have said that
up to 50,000 European lorry drivers can be given temporary visas for the next three months,
so that they can do this work. I’m not sure how many European lorry drivers will want
to take this up – they may prefer to continue working in Europe rather than come to the
UK to work temporarily! But, it’s not just Brexit that’s the cause of this problem.
Also a problem in the UK – the number of driving tests for HGV drivers that were cancelled
because of the pandemic. It’s estimated that there is a backlog of 40,000 HGV driver
tests. Well, part of the solution surely is to put more people on that – and get those
drivers licences done as quickly as possible! I don’t know what HGV drivers normally get
paid. It’s certainly a hard job, with unsocial hours, and there aren’t that many people
who want to do it. There are also regulations, rules about how long you can drive for, before
you have to take a break. I do see the reason for these rules, but I also see that it makes
the overall journey take a lot longer. I heard on the news that the rate of pay for HGV drivers
is going up enormously – maybe more people will be tempted to do it.
Anyway, whatever the UK government do about this issue, it’s not going to be sorted
out immediately. I wonder what’s going to happen. I’m sure it’s not going to be
a situation we can’t live with – we just have to do without certain things. Maybe it’s
going to be a difficult period. And maybe this sort of thing makes us give a different
priority to certain types of jobs – like HGV drivers! There wouldn’t be a lot of
food on our table without them, that’s for sure – we’re entirely dependent upon them,
actually!
Let us know whether anything like this is a problem in your country? Maybe it’s just
a UK thing. Maybe this is just another result of Brexit having happened. And probably this
is something that market forces will put right – if you offer better terms and conditions
and better working hours to HGV licence holders, maybe you don’t have shortage of drivers.
But let’s see what happens. We’re definitely starting to think differently about some jobs
– and to appreciate them more. So here’s to HGV drivers – we appreciate you and the
important job that you do for us.
And just a thought as we finish – if you listened to our podcast last Monday on ‘Adverbs
of Probability’, see how many of those adverbs you can spot in this podcast!
Enough for now. Have a lovely day. Speak to you again soon. Goodbye.
That’s the end of this podcast – I hope you enjoyed it. You can listen to hundreds
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