Alongside a number of RHA colleagues, I attended the Labour Party conference this week. It provided a unique opportunity for us to engage with decision-makers on behalf of our members and to highlight the criticality of our sector to the nation’s economy. Throughout the main speeches and the various fringe events, I heard three words repeated regularly: Growth, skills and investment.
During the Chancellor’s remarks on Monday morning, she was clear - “growth is the challenge and investment is the solution.”
I agree and we’ve been consistent with our view that the road transport sector has a huge part to play in the government’s stated mission of driving growth. To get there, skills investment will be key. We’ve made our asks clear on this in our submission ahead of the autumn budget in October.
With an ageing workforce, a shortage in areas such as technicians and with changes coming via AI and decarbonisation, our sector needs a skilled workforce equipped for the challenges ahead. As technology evolves, businesses are going to experience considerable changes in the next five to ten years and future skills will be needed to cope with the change. These skills will important if we’re to futureproof supply-chains and we stand ready to work with policymakers to meet the challenges ahead.
As I said in a fascinating SME skills roundtable at the party conference; building the foundations for a future workforce is essential in the next few years. At this well attended event, we also discussed the key Green Skills challenges facing recruitment to our sector and how the government can address this concern. With a 41% decline in overall apprenticeships, it’s clear the present outdated system is restrictive and doesn’t allow for the flexible training needs of businesses.
We’ve long campaigned for reform of the Apprenticeship Levy which has disadvantaged firms in our industry applying for funding. As we laid out in our recently published blueprint document, we want employers to be able to use available funds for the courses and training that best works for them. For that reason, we welcome the skills reform agenda.
We hope that the new growth and skills levy will unlock career opportunities and pathways for future opportunities in road transport and logistics. The government has pledged that this will be possible through Skills England – with a proposed renewed focus on quality technical education.
We want businesses to have much more choice available, with training tailored to suit their specific needs and requirements. Given the shortages that our sector is still experiencing in certain areas and will potentially face in the future, we want to see this more accessible system in place as soon as practically possible. One way of doing this would be making the successful HGV skills bootcamps a permanently funded option. This would help to ensure the resilience of the future HGV driving workforce. Given the success to date of these bootcamps, we recommend that bus and coach licence acquisition be added and for the bootcamp to become a ‘heavy vehicle driver bootcamp’, rather than an HGV driver one.
We welcome the focus on young people and future career pathways at this Labour Conference. During our tenth annual National lorry Week campaign (4th-8th November), we’ll be clearly spotlighting the career opportunities in our sector, highlighting the opportunities for growth and we’ll be repeating our calls for the key skills investment that will make more opportunities possible throughout the United Kingdom.
We want to see more routes available into careers in our sector, a sector which is key to Britain’s prospects. We’ll continue to work with training providers, the education sector, and government at all levels across the UK to make sure we get this right.
Richard Smith, RHA MD
Pictured (L-R) are RHA skills policy lead - Sally Gilson; Jack Abbott MP; Sarah Edwards MP; Catherine Atkinson MP and RHA MD - Richard Smith
