It could have ended in catastrophe, a lorry carrying 25,000 litres of caustic soda was intercepted on a motorway in Murcia after traffic officers spotted it weaving unpredictably across lanes, with the driver later found to have an alcohol level more than six times the legal limit for professional drivers. 

The articulated lorry was travelling along the A-7 near Alhama de Murcia, transporting the hazardous chemical from Sevilla to Murcia when a Guardia Civil traffic patrol noticed something was seriously wrong. Instead of holding a steady course, the heavy goods vehicle repeatedly drifted between lanes and even veered onto the hard shoulder, creating what officers described as a serious danger for everyone sharing the motorway. 

A dangerous load and an even more dangerous driver

Its cargo consisted of 25,000 litres of caustic soda, also known as sodium hydroxide, a highly corrosive chemical widely used in industrial processes. While it can be transported safely under strict regulations, any collision involving such a load has the potential to create a major emergency for motorists and emergency services alike. Recognising the immediate risk, officers from the Guardia Civil’s Lorca Traffic Unit moved quickly to stop the vehicle before anyone was injured.

Once the lorry had been brought safely to a halt, officers carried out a breathalyser test on the driver. The results were startling. The man recorded readings of 1.04 and 1.03 milligrams of alcohol per litre of exhaled air. Professional drivers in Spain are limited to 0.15 mg/l, meaning he was driving at more than six times the maximum legal limit. 

Disaster avoided on one of Murcia’s busiest motorways

The A-7 is one of Spain’s busiest transport corridors, carrying thousands of cars and heavy goods vehicles every day. A fully loaded articulated lorry already requires greater stopping distances and careful handling. Add alcohol to the equation, together with a tanker transporting dangerous chemicals, and the consequences could have been devastating.

Fortunately, officers intervened before the journey ended in tragedy. The Guardia Civil has now opened an investigation into the driver for an alleged offence against road safety after his exceptionally high alcohol reading. 

Why caustic soda demands extreme care

Caustic soda is an essential industrial product used in the manufacture of paper, cleaning products, textiles and water treatment. Despite its everyday uses, it is classified as a dangerous substance because it can cause severe chemical burns if released and comes into contact with skin or eyes.

For that reason, vehicles transporting the chemical are subject to strict safety rules, while drivers must meet additional professional standards. Those standards include the much lower legal alcohol limit that applies to professional drivers compared with private motorists.

A reminder of the risks on Spain’s roads

Drink-driving remains one of the leading causes of serious road collisions across Spain, despite years of awareness campaigns and tougher enforcement. When large commercial vehicles are involved, the risks become even greater because of their size, weight and the type of cargo they often carry. The Guardia Civil regularly carries out roadside checks targeting alcohol, drugs and dangerous driving, particularly on routes used by heavy goods vehicles.

In this case, officers believe their intervention prevented a potentially serious incident before it had the chance to unfold. For motorists travelling along the A-7 that day, the weaving lorry may have looked like just another reckless driver. What they could not have known was that it was carrying 25,000 litres of a hazardous chemical, and that the man behind the wheel had allegedly been driving while heavily over the legal alcohol limit. 

The nine to five is losing its grip on customer service. Someone orders a lamp at 11pm, spots the wrong delivery address at midnight, and wants it sorted before breakfast. The big retailers taught people that this is normal, and the expectation does not shrink just because the seller is a two-person firm in Leeds rather than a national chain.

The habit has numbers behind it. Ofcom found that UK adults now spend an average of four and a half hours online each day, up ten minutes on the previous year, with most of that time on a smartphone. People shop, browse and fire off questions whenever they happen to be scrolling, which is as likely to be a Sunday evening on the sofa as it is a Tuesday morning at a desk. A query sent at 10pm feels perfectly reasonable to the person sending it. The reply they get at 9.15 the next morning can already feel slow.

For most British firms, staffing around that reality is simply not an option. According to official figures from the Department for Business and Trade, there were 5.7 million private sector businesses in the UK at the start of 2025, and 5.64 million of them were small, with fewer than 50 employees. A large share have no employees at all beyond the owner. Nobody in that position is hiring a night shift to watch the inbox, and even firms with a small team rarely have anyone rostered past six.

At the same time, the bar keeps moving. The latest UK Customer Satisfaction Index from the Institute of Customer Service put national customer satisfaction at 78.2 out of 100 in January 2026, the highest level since July 2022, with 83.2 per cent of customer experiences rated as right first time. That is good news for consumers and awkward news for any business still working through Monday’s messages on Wednesday. When the average experience improves, the slow responder stands out more, not less.

So how do small firms close the gap without cloning themselves? Increasingly, the answer is to stop treating every question as something that needs a live human at the moment it arrives. A well-built help centre does a surprising amount of the work. Most businesses find that a handful of questions make up the bulk of their inbox: where is my order, how do returns work, what does this price include, can I change my booking. Answer each of those once, properly, in writing, and that answer is on duty at 3am without complaint.

Self-service goes further than a page of FAQs. Many firms now give customers a customer portal, a secure space where they can log in, raise a request, track its progress and see everything they have asked before. That single change removes a whole category of correspondence, the “any update on this?” email, because the update is sitting there whenever the customer cares to look. For businesses handling ongoing work rather than one-off sales, think accountants, letting agents, IT support firms or tradespeople juggling multiple jobs, it also means clients stop asking for the same document twice. The customer sees a tidy record of everything in flight, the business sees fewer interruptions, and both sides get their evenings back.

Automation fills in more of the gaps, applied with a little care. An instant acknowledgement that confirms a message has landed, states realistic response hours and links to the relevant help article will satisfy a good chunk of late-night senders on the spot. Routing rules can make sure an urgent complaint does not sit in the same queue as a newsletter enquiry. AI-assisted answers now handle routine questions convincingly, though the sensible firms keep anything involving judgement, money or an unhappy customer for a person. Always-on service fails the moment a customer feels fobbed off by a machine that cannot actually help.

None of this requires a big budget or a technical background, but it does require knowing what people actually ask. A practical starting point is to spend two weeks logging every inbound question, then write permanent, findable answers to the ten most common. Check which ones customers actually read and keep tuning from there. Even a modest version of this pays back quickly, because every deflected question is time recovered, and the answers only need writing once. The aim is not to hide from customers behind software. It is to reserve human attention for the conversations that genuinely need it, and let the rest resolve themselves at whatever hour they arrive.

Always-on has a slightly threatening ring for anyone who already answers work emails on holiday. In practice it means the opposite. The businesses getting this right are not working longer hours. They have simply built a front door that stays open when they are not there, and their customers have stopped noticing the difference.

Children’s existing TikTok or Instagram profiles in France now have an expiration date. New sign-ups face a September cutoff, while older accounts have until January, turning an ambitious ban into Europe’s biggest age-checking test.

September stops new accounts and January catches the rest

France has become the first European country to carry a nationwide social media ban for under-15s through both houses of parliament. The National Assembly and Senate approved the final compromise text on Tuesday, July 21. Subject to formal promulgation and any constitutional or European legal challenges, the first part is scheduled to take effect on September 1, 2026.

From that date, children under 15 would be prohibited from opening new social media accounts and those created earlier will receive another four months, taking the final deadline to January 1, 2027. This doesn’t mean every profile will suddenly be deleted. Platforms will first need to prevent under-15s from continuing to access their services, which could involve blocking, suspending or closing accounts once a user’s age has been officially established. 

Unlike France’s earlier rules, parental permission would not allow a younger child to bypass the restriction. However, the adopted parliamentary text excludes online encyclopaedias, educational and scientific directories and certain open-source educational platforms.

It does not contain a definitive list of affected apps. TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook and X are obvious candidates, but hybrid services combining videos, messaging, gaming and public posts like Discord, YouTube or Reddit may need further clarification.

The same legislation extends France’s mobile-phone prohibition to lycées, the schools generally attended by pupils aged 15 to 18, from the 2026–27 academic year. Individual schools will set out practical arrangements and exceptions in their internal rules.

The ban may put adult accounts through an age check too

Keeping children out requires platforms to work out who is old enough to remain, and that’s where the change begins to affect adults as well. Platforms are expected to use approved age-assurance systems, but France’s final parliamentary text does not prescribe one universal method. Checks could involve an identity document, a mobile operator, existing account information or software estimating whether a person is above the age threshold.

The European Commission is developing a privacy-focused “mini wallet” that can confirm someone is above a particular age without sending their name, date of birth or full identity to the social network. Member states have been encouraged to begin rolling out compatible tools by the end of 2026.

For many long-established adult accounts, platforms may already have enough reliable information to avoid a fresh check. Others could be asked to prove their age when creating an account, recovering one or accessing social media without signing in.

That makes privacy and accuracy central to the French experiment. A system must identify children who may have entered a false birthday without locking adults out or forcing everyone to hand sensitive identity documents directly to technology companies.

How Australia showed that passing the ban is the easy part

Australia’s under-16 restriction offers an early indication of how difficult enforcement can be. A University of Newcastle study followed 408 adolescents before and three months after the Australian rules began. Around 86 per cent of participating under-16s said they had still accessed at least one restricted platform during the previous week. Only two-thirds encountered an age check. Some used false accounts, profiles belonging to friends or relatives, or private browsing to get around restrictions.

The researchers stressed that these were early, self-reported findings and that compliance systems may improve. However, the results suggest that France’s success going forward will depend heavily on how consistently platforms can detect the age of their users and close loopholes.

France’s health agency, ANSES, has meanwhile reviewed more than 1,000 scientific studies related to phone use. It identified possible negative effects involving sleep, self-esteem, anxiety, depression and exposure to cyberviolence. It also found that 58 per cent of French 12 to 17-year-olds use social media daily. The agency recommended that minors should only access services designed and configured to protect their health. That supports tougher safeguards, although it does not by itself prove that a blanket national ban will improve children’s wellbeing.

The UK has committed while Spain is still negotiating

The UK is no longer simply considering whether to follow France. On June 15, the British government committed to preventing under-16s from using certain social media platforms. The first regulations are expected before the end of 2026, with implementation planned for spring 2027. The intended scope includes TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, X and YouTube, while private messaging services such as WhatsApp and Signal are expected to remain available.

Spain’s position is less settled. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez announced an under-16 restriction in February, but no nationwide ban has yet taken effect. As recently as July 7, the government said it was still negotiating legislation to prevent under-16s from accessing social media. Spain is also developing a Digital Wallet capable of confirming age online while limiting the personal information shared with platforms.

On September 1, people should start to see a wide variety of discussion around the new ban, when France intends to stop the creation of new under-15 accounts. Then by January, platforms will be expected to show whether they really can identify and stop the children already using their services.