To help highlight the Road Haulage Association’s “National Lorry Week” which this year was between 4^th and 8^th November 2024, the Road Haulage Association and the DVSA’s leadership team decided to spend some time work shadowing each other to see what insights and learning they could glean from their ‘oppos’!

National Lorry Week is a campaign run by the RHA that aims to “shine a spotlight on skills, careers and opportunities” in the logistics/haulage industry and the vital role that haulage plays in everyone’s day to day lives as well as ensuring economic growth for the country.  The DVSA is also on record as wanting to work hard to bring people into the agency and provide training and skills to make sure that the lorries on the UK’s roads are safe.

For the work shadowing exercise, three of the DVSA’s directors spent time with 6 Road Haulage Association directors and one RHA member at their operations base and then the RHA directors and member were invited to attend DVSA operational units in return.

All the RHA directors and member own or run their own haulage firms which allowed the DVSA leadership team to see “with their own eyes” what haulage firms experience on a day-to-day basis when managing large fleets of lorries and how they work to ensure compliance with the rules and regulations whilst doing so.

Conversely the access given to the RHA members to the technology and the skills of the DVSA’s enforcement officers was an eye opener for the hauliers and a reminder of the important job the agency and its workers do to ensure that the roads are safe and that all hauliers are subject to the DVSA’s scrutiny which ensures that the playing field is a level one.

The exercise was heralded by those who took part in it as “really insightful” and provided an opportunity to “learn things about the industry and testing and enforcement work respectively, which changed the way we see each other’s roles”.  The exercise links directly with the DVSA’s “Vision to 2030” and was called a huge success “...proving that two perspectives are better than one and a diversity of views can enrich the decisions that we [as an industry] make”.

You can view Tim Wray of Multi Modal Logistics and Loveday Ryder the DVSA’s Chief Executive discuss their work shadowing by clicking here and here.

© Richard Pelly, November 2024