Gist, bellshill

A true salary is never for a set number of hours, it is to do the job, whatever it requires, within legal limits obviously. A set weekly pay, for an agreed number of hours averaged over a period, is not a salary, but averaged hourly pay.

Your comment about what the agency drivers make in the good times, covering the bad is precisely the point I was making. In a way the salary comes to the same thing.
If planners are letting agency drivers work maximum hours on hourly pay, whilst salaried staff are not, then senior management should be looking at that. It is obviously cheaper for the company to have the guy on the salary doing 15 hours, and the hourly paid man going home after 9; not what the company drivers want to hear, but a fact all the same.