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The chair of a group of MPs has accused the foreign secretary, Liz Truss, of treating her second role as minister of women and equalities as a “side hustle”.
A damning report from the women and equalities committee accused the government of sidelining the push for equality, and said it risked “regression on equal rights after decades of progress”.
It is obvious that the current setup of Cabinet leaves no space or time to really address inequality in the UK.
By effectively treating the role of women and equalities minister as a side hustle, the government is demonstrating its lack of willingness to invest energy in creating change.
Related: Liz Truss accused of treating equalities role as ‘side hustle’
A minister has denied that Brexit was part of the problem for recruiting HGV drivers in the UK, instead arguing that being divorced from the European Union had helped enable some of the solutions.
Transport secretary Grant Shapps told Sky News:
I’ve seen people point to Brexit as if it is the culprit here. In fact, they are wrong.
Not only are there very large and even larger shortages in other EU countries like Poland and Germany, which clearly can’t be to do with Brexit, but actually because of Brexit I’ve been able to change the law and alter the way our driving tests operate in a way I could not have done if we were still part of the EU.
Covid is the main reason. It is a global problem and Europe is hit particularly bad.
We’ve got, for example, in Germany a 60,000 shortage and Poland a 123,000 shortage of lorry drivers, so as I say it is the principal cause of the problem and we are working very hard to change it, including changing the law in order to provide more tests for HGV drivers and encouraging people back into the market.
There have been big failures in planning for this situation and the additional red tape that has been created, which was not inevitable, it was not an inevitable result of Brexit in many cases, but that hasn’t been tackled by government.
I talk to advanced manufacturers in my patch for example, and they tell me that now they have got to fill in dozens of pages of paperwork and that is quite a tall order for a HGV driver if they have got to be dealing with all of that, as well as getting goods from one place to another.