As to agency drivers earning more. Please tell me where. I drive class 2 mainly and am on £6.75 ph, and thats because of a pay rise last week. Sometimes i get a job that pays £7.00ph!. So if we have to pay for this CPC ourselves and lose pay doing it, i will be well out of pocket.
Who’s going to pay for this training? It’ll be like the [zb] digi-tacho cards all over again. A few perm drivers will get theirs on the company, the rest of us will pay out of our own pockets to keep some bigwig in Whitehall happy because he’s gold-plated the euro regs, and 95% of the euro zone will give them out on the back of cereal packets. 
I do have an issue with the cost, because ontop of the actual course cost I’ll lose about 650 in lost earnings.
But my biggest grip is the way its been ‘promoted’. That it will raise the profile of the industry and encourage more people into it!
What absolute [ZB]'s, it won’t change the pay, hours or conditions one little bit, or make us more acceptable to the general public, which incidenty will never change until they realise they actually need us (more chance of pigs flying there then). The ony thing it will do is, create a small driver shortage, when the older ones don’t bother and the one’s who pay for it themselves find other work.
I agree with the Titel 
if you all really want to know how it pans out, lets go back in time…
The year 1995 ish,
Great rumblings in the haulage industry, its been decided that there must be an industry standard that all haulage companys must adhere to,and we’ll call it the BS5250. {later to become ISO90001}.
Any haulier wishing to do work for any ‘Blue Chip’ companies must have paid out the umpteen squillion £ssss to be assessed, and then re-assessed every 5 years or so, to do any work for these companys.
No british standard symbol after your company name, then no work for you matey boy.
Now that all said companys have the necessary Qualifications in place,all the job description manuals are gathering dust,in the cupboard,all employees can jump into each others jobs and know exactly what to do, oh and lets not forget the squillions of £sss spent, lets move on to the present day…
oops, sorry for the delay, was just trying to remember the last time any customer asked me if i was ISO9001 accredited, before i took that urgent load down the road.
I just get the feeling that history might repeat itself here, but the important thing is look who’s paying the bill again!
Be interesting to see how much, on everage, it will cost a newbie wanting to do their C as they will have the medical, theory, HPT, Initial Driver CPC and the LGV C course to fund.
I would say it is going to cost about £300 extra for a new driver to get qualified.
But what about the stealth tax of £8.75 per driver per year.
What about the test fee going upto £105 now when this 18% increase is supposed to allow for the extra 10 mins being added to test in 18 months time.
What about the £50 test fee for the show me tell me questions that last for 30 mins
What about the £30 test fee for case study part of the theory test.
Come on DSA how can you justify these charges. Lets see the working out.
According to the shiny pamphlett courtesy of Mercedes-Benz and Commerical Motor there are 350,000 people who earn their living daily with their HGV licence plus another 1.2m with a licence who only use it occasionally.
What are the 1.2m supposed to do? The industry loses perfectly good drivers who maybe only drives ten weekends per year because they aren’t going to bother doing their CPC it isn’t worth it.
I don’t suppose the people who thought this up considered that did they?
P.S. If other countries enforce it as strictly as we do I’ll eat my hat! 
P.P.S. Not carrying a valid CPC card = driving without a licence when this comes in…
will possibly makle it harder for easter euopean drivers steal our jobs n maybe force wages up 
I still don’t understand why they all want us to have yet another card purely to say we have the CPC, if its essentially part of the same licence, why not put it on our driving licences, surely 3 little letters next to the current entitlement, or just a new category on the bottom or something would be far simpler and less to worry about losing/forgetting.