Truck Driver Safety
A Problem in Calais
The scenes in recent weeks in the port town of Calais, which serves as the gateway into the UK for transport and freight companies, shows how the broad immigration crisis across Europe impacts upon specific industries more than most. Though not as horrific as the ill-fated sea crossings by desperate migrants in the Mediterranean, Calais is still a desperate situation. The Independent reports that lorry drivers are feeling intimidated and harassed by stowaways on board their trucks.
“We need help, they are aggressive, they are closing the doors so we don’t see what happens and they are trying to go into our trucks, they are stealing our goods,” says one truck driver while searching her vehicle.
The problem is clear, illegal migrants are trying to gain access to the UK by jumping on transport trucks thereby putting their lives, and the lives of drivers, in jeopardy. The situation may have also been exasperated by a recent strike by French ferry workers who blocked key access to the port and forced the closure of the Channel Tunnel. This action brought trucks to a halt and made them easy targets for stowaways.
Dan Cook, the Operations Director of Europa Worldwide, a transport and logistics company who have witnessed the crisis firsthand spoke with Sky News, “It has phenomenal cost attached to it, Europa moves up to 60 trailers a day between the United Kingdom and the Continent with most of them crossing between Dover and Calais.” Europa are not alone among transport companies who are feeling the crisis in their pocket as well as in plummeting driver morale.
The frontline of European immigration has now moved into private industry and will take its toll on transport and logistics if the governments of both France and the UK cannot come to grips with the problem soon.
“There is without question a huge driver welfare issue,” said Dan “we see drivers taking mobile footage of the incidents going on and these aren’t incidents that are happening in the middle of nowhere, these are trucks that are queuing on the main highways with migrants trying to get on board.” According to the Office of National Statistics, net migration into the U.K was 318,000 at the end of 2014 up from 209,000 in 2013.
“They are totally unacceptable scenes that we have been seeing,” said the Prime Minister David Cameron speaking about the situation at Calais to the House of Commons
Cameron continued, “Three things we must act on are, first of all better security at Calais, secondly we’ve got to work with our European partners to stop this problem at source, and thirdly we’ve got to do more to make sure that Britain is a less easy place for illegal migrants to come to and work in.”
Guidelines for Drivers
For drivers in the region, the UK Home Office and Border Force have released rules and guidelines for drivers to help stop illegal immigration. According to the guide, drivers must ensure their vehicle is properly secured with padlocks, tilt cords and seals and they must record the checks that they make to verify these security measures. Unfortunately, a large amount of responsibility for immigration control is being landed on the shoulders of civilian freight drivers during this crisis. Drivers should also not approach anybody who may be hiding in their vehicle, according to the guide, and they should stay in the truck and contact the police. If the proper precautions are not undertaken by transport workers it is the company that may be fined and the vehicle can be impounded or the driver arrested. There is, of course, the right of appeal and the government guidelines here outline how to appeal if you feel you have been wrongly punished in an incident involving stowaways.
Establishing good systems for these driver checks should be done in advance so that drivers are aware of company protocol. If you would like any help in delivering company training to your workers take a look at our 60 seconds Video or Try a Free Demo Today.
Image attribution: Veronica538 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons
