Van Driver Agency in Chapeltown

The warehouses around Chapeltown feed stores across the whole of northern England, so a gap in the pick on Monday is a gap on a shelf in Newcastle or Carlisle on Tuesday.

The freight geography around Chapeltown runs on the M62, M1, M18, A1(M) and A63, the rail freight terminals at iPort Doncaster and Wakefield Europort and the ABP Humber ports at Hull, Goole and Immingham. Operators draw on Sherburn Enterprise Park at Sherburn-in-Elmet, on A1(M) junction 42 and the employers booking temporary staff here are typically steel, engineering and building-products manufacturers on flatbed and curtainside work.

Bulk cargoes through the Humber arrive on vessel schedules, which puts yard, tipping and haulage requirements outside normal working patterns.

Nights on the M62 trunk routes, running between the northern distribution centres and back before morning.

Sortation and load-out start before dawn, with routes out by mid-morning. Grocery and evening delivery slots run through to late evening, including weekends.

Before an agency driver takes a company van, somebody has to confirm the insurance covers them, that the licence check is current and that the walkaround defect check has been done and signed. It is a five-minute question that stops a shift dead at six in the morning if nobody asked it the night before, so it gets asked when the booking is taken.

Van cover on a rolling booking reaches the twelve-week Agency Workers Regulations threshold quickly, because the shifts are dense. The count runs from the first shift, it does not reset because somebody had a week off and the hirer hears about it before parity applies rather than after.

The Agency Workers Regulations 2010 give an agency worker equal treatment on pay and basic conditions after 12 weeks in the same role with the same hirer. That clock starts on the first shift and we surface the count so it is never a surprise on the invoice.