Great Britain will use the army in the fuel crisis from Monday

London The British government will use the army from Monday to bridge the bottlenecks in the gasoline supply. The government announced on Friday that 200 soldiers – including 100 drivers – would complete appropriate training at the weekend and could then start delivery trips on Monday.

Great Britain currently has significant bottlenecks here. This is not due to a lack of gasoline. In fact, sufficient amounts of fuel cannot be transported to the filling stations because tens of thousands of truck drivers are missing. Panic and hamster purchases have recently made the situation even worse. In the past few days, the British government had tried to calm the population down and declared that the crisis was under control. But the fuel shortage continued at the beginning of the weekend.

According to a media report, a number of Germans living in Great Britain with an older driver’s license have now received mail from the British government. Thousands of Germans in the country who had obtained their driver’s license before 1999 were written to as they were allowed to drive smaller trucks, reported the Independent newspaper.

In the letter from the Ministry of Transport, which the newspaper has received, it is suggested to those addressed to consider a “return” to the trucking industry – even if many of the addressees have never been behind the wheel of a truck. “There are great opportunities for truck drivers in the logistics industry and working conditions have improved across the sector,” the letter reads. “Your skills and experience have never been needed more than they are now.”

The UK Department of Transportation said the letter had been sent to nearly a million people with truck drivers’ licenses. For data protection reasons, it was impossible to filter the list of recipients more precisely by occupation.

Drivers with German driving licenses issued before 1999 may, under certain conditions, drive small trucks with a maximum weight of 7500 kilograms.

“It’s nice to know that there are still job prospects here for us after Brexit,” said a 41-year-old German who lives with his wife in London, the “Independent”. “If we had gone to Germany, we would probably never have been recruited as truck drivers by headhunters.”

For now, however, he wants to keep his job at an investment bank, and his wife has never driven a bigger car than a Volvo and will probably turn down the “exciting opportunity”.

Corona caused training to stall

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has meanwhile rejected calls to relax immigration rules in his country.

“What we don’t want is to go back to a situation where the logistics industry relies on a lot of cheap immigration, which means that salaries don’t go up and the quality of jobs doesn’t go up,” Johnson said on Saturday. The UK economy must end its dependence on poorly paid foreign workers in order to become a “well-paid, well-educated, highly productive economy”. The British Conservative Party Conference begins in Manchester on Sunday. The fuel crisis threatens to overshadow the conference.

There is an estimated 100,000 shortage of truck drivers in the UK. Because of the Brexit, many truckers have returned to the European continent. In addition, the corona restrictions meant that training came to a standstill. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s Conservative government is trying to downplay the discussion that the problems in supply and supply chains that have occurred in recent weeks, not just with gasoline, have something to do with Brexit.

In addition, the country is already struggling with rising gas prices, which are driving up energy costs and have led to a shortage of goods. The delivery bottlenecks also mean that consumer goods become significantly more expensive before the Christmas business. Farmers warned on Friday that there was a risk of mass slaughter of pigs because there was also a lack of butchers and slaughterhouse employees.

Last Sunday the government in London announced temporary visas for 5,000 truck drivers and 5,500 employees in the poultry industry. However, many refused because the time frame was too short. In the meantime, the government has adjusted its offer in order to solve the logistics problem quickly. The visas should be valid longer than originally planned. The approximately 5000 planned work permits for truck drivers are to be issued by the end of February instead of Christmas.

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