Brexit: driving a solution

By Richard North - June 26, 2021

There is a certain justice, schadenfreude, or whatever you want to call it in seeing “industry chiefs” warning about the possibility (or likelihood) of food shortages, due to the lack of lorry drivers. This is the Guardian reporting, a day behind the Telegraph and the Mirror, and a gaggle of other media, including ITV News.

We are led to believe that the nation has “lost” 100,000 lorry drivers due to Brexit, as well as Covid. These seem to be mostly Eastern European citizens and, freedom of movement notwithstanding, the “industry” wants them back.

And – as if he didn’t have enough to do, dressing up to play doctors and nurses, as well as Bob the Builder in his hi-viz jackets – Johnson has been asked to intervene “urgently” to allow these upright citizens back into the country on special visas.

Oddly enough, the Telegraph has it slightly differently. The day before the Guardian, it reported that Logistics UK and the Chartered Institute of Logistics and Transport (CILT) had written to the Government warning of the “76,000 driver shortage”.

This must be an extremely serious problem indeed if, in the space of a day, the shortage has increased by nearly 25,000. By that measure, at the end of next week, we’ll be looking at a cumulative shortfall of nearly 300,000. By the end of the year, we’re talking about four million having gone missing.

The funny thing is that, less than a week ago, Pete picked up a report that had the British International Freight Association claiming that the UK was short of 52,000 drivers, so if we’re up to 100,000 already, then we’re looking as a Lemming-like exodus, with drivers pouring over the cliffs at Dover in their thousands.

At that rate of loss, not even if Border Farce handed over all its rubber dinghy travellers would the industry be able to make up its numbers, so Johnson had better really get a move on. He could, of course, start with his ordering his health secretary and his girlfriend to re-train, but even his whole cabinet would hardly make a dent.

From the look of it though, even on an expedited training course, thousands of Hancocks couldn’t make a lot of difference. For instance, Richard Burnett, chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, has told ITV News: “We are weeks away from gaps on the shelves, it is as serious as that”.

Given that this week saw the fifth anniversary of the EU referendum, though, and we haven’t yet had even two years of Covid, one really has to wonder what “industry” has been doing all this time to prepare for a shortage which they must have known was coming.

It certainly seems a bit lax on the part of the planners that they should wait until the supermarket shelves are about to empty and tons of food are being dumped for want of transport. Covid notwithstanding, they surely could have done something over the last five years to ensure that the wheels kept turning.

But then, as Pete also reports, this issue actually predates the referendum. At the end of 2014, we had the Food Manufacturer magazine headlining, “HGV driver shortage could cripple food industry”, telling us that more than 45,000 HGV drivers were due to retire “within the next two years”, putting the crisis point at the end of 2016.

Over six years ago, this magazine was citing a “source close to the industry”, saying that supermarkets would be hit hard, “despite denying the claims”. The retailers “won’t want to say how big the issue is, especially right before Christmas”, this source said. “They don’t want anyone to think that there is an issue, but it is known to be a serious problem in the sector”.

The magazine then quoted Sally Roberts, skills policy and development manager at the Freight Transport Association. She warned that the problem was “widespread and becoming more severe”. It was a question of “all freight firms” believing the issue was going to continue, and that included firms that delivered to the supermarkets.

Tellingly, spokeswomen from Tesco, Sainsbury and Asda all denied the chains would face problems getting produce to their stores now or in the future. An Asda spokeswoman said: “We work hard to recruit and train our own drivers and are pleased that over 80 percent of our deliveries are done by these colleagues”.

Sainsbury’s said that they always ensured they had enough drivers, hadn’t experienced any problems and didn’t anticipate having any problems in future. Tesco said the shortage of HGV drivers was not something that would affect its operations.

The reality of the situation though was that, back then, more than 60 percent of current HGV drivers were aged 55 and only five percent were under the age of 25. The problem had become so bad that several logistic firms had started to mothball parts of their HGV fleets.

A month later, a rival magazine was reporting that the RHA has met with then business secretary Vince Cable, in the Cameron administration, to highlight the impact the driver shortage was having on the economy and how it could be addressed.

RHA chief executive Richard Burnett also put across the industry’s need for a government training fund to help aspiring HGV drivers acquire their licence, which he said appears to be available but not accessible.

The following March, 2015, we saw a report that the government was to “look into funding support” for hauliers to recruit and train new drivers as part of George Osborne’s 2015-16 budget plan.

However, James Hookham, Freight Transport Association’s managing director of policy and communications, said that solving the problem in the longer term meant attracting more young people to the industry. The cost of acquiring the necessary licence (£3,000), he said, acted as a major barrier to many young people.

For its part, the government was to “review the speed with which Heavy Goods Vehicle driving tests and driver medical assessments currently take place and consider options to accelerate both”.

Hookham was in no doubt that this was the direction to look. “Speeding up driving test bookings for truck drivers and medical assessments will help us get qualified drivers on the road quicker and more reliably helping industry address its shortfall of 60,000 drivers”.

Despite further initiatives, though, nothing seems to have dented the problem. Thus, more than six years on, we have Richard Burnett, chief executive of the Road Haulage Association, saying that government “must put HGV drivers on the shortage occupation list urgently”.

“We need to get a pool of labour quickly”, he says, “because we cannot train them quickly enough and we need to plug this gap. We’ll have British HGV drivers going on summer holiday soon, which means no backfill at all. So the problem is only going to get worse”.

This time around, though, the problems are “Bexit and Covid”, even though the shortage has been on its way for nearly a decade. And to solve it, it seems, we must now open the borders again and let EU workers flood in, all because we couldn’t get ourselves organised enough to train our own.

But here, Brexit is actually doing its job. Instead of being able to exploit cheap foreign workers to fill the gaps, the industry and government will have to do something constructive about the problem. It’s a pity Cameron didn’t take the bull by the horns a few years earlier.