Transport: predictable and predicted

By Richard North - September 29, 2021

I am not really sure quite what to call it, but “smug arrogance” will have to suffice as the Telegraph informs us that “it has emerged that the haulage industry was warned as far back as 2016 that it faced a shortage of as many as 100,000 drivers as it struggled to attract new truckers to replace those retiring or leaving the industry”.

“It has emerged”? Seriously? In June of this year, I wrote a piece, which pointed out that, in late 2014, the haulage industry was well aware that there was an HGV driver shortage on the way, with warnings that this could cripple the food industry.

This was in one of the main haulage sector magazines, as was another report, to which I referred, which was published a month later. The report disclosed that the RHA had met with then business secretary Vince Cable, in the Cameron coalition government, to highlight the impact the driver shortage was having on the economy and how it could be addressed.

RHA chief executive Richard Burnett was reported as putting 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.

From the following March, 2015, I referred to another report. This had it 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.

James Hookham, Freight Transport Association’s managing director of policy and communications, was cited, saying 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”.

To add more to this, I have another magazine report, this one in Commercial Motor, dated 16 February 2015, reporting that the RHA was to meet with the Treasury to thrash out “the potential of direct funding for road haulage employers wanting to train new HGV drivers”.

Reference was made to the meeting with Vince Cable, when RHA chief executive Richard Burnett had highlighted “the enormity of the HGV driver shortage crisis affecting the logistics sector”. This, the report went, was taken “very seriously” by the minister, who acknowledged there was an issue.

In the February meeting, the RHA was to ask the Treasury for funding of £3,000 per person to be made available and paid directly to operators looking to train up new drivers. Burnett said the meeting marked a “major milestone” for the association and for the industry as a whole.

The UK haulage industry, he said, is responsible for the efficient and cost-effective movement of 85 percent of all goods transported. “Their job is, quite literally, to move the economy. However, that can only be achieved with a strong and thriving driver workforce”, he added.

Let me stress that this article is dated 16 February 2015 – more than a year before the EU referendum. And here we have the RHA stating that the UK was “currently 40,000 drivers short, with 45,000 due to retire in the next two years, not including those who have to leave for medical reasons or who have found another job”. However, at that stage, only 17,000 new drivers were entering the industry annually. “Do the maths – this has become an untenable situation. At a time a time of economic recovery, the chancellor now presides over the future of the UK haulage industry”, Burnett warned.

This, I remind you, is the RHA chief executive speaking. He added that it was imperative to break the pattern of under-investment in HGV driving skills and too heavy a reliance on drivers from Eastern Europe. “These critical factors have resulted in the current shortage of drivers and, if not urgently addressed, will cause a bad situation to get much worse”.

To close off its report, Commercial Motor adds a little rider of its own, telling us that earlier this month, the government had “dismissed the option of extending the existing student loans system to trainee drivers”. This had been discussed as a possible funding route in a recent All-Party Parliamentary Group on Freight Transport report.

I haven’t found a copy of this report, but have established that it was entitled “Barriers to Youth Employment in the Freight Transport Sector”. Its publication at the time, in January 2015, was widely reported in the trade press (but not in the national media), not least in The Loadstar, which headed its report: “HGV driver shortage is ‘a ticking time bomb’ for UK logistics sector, say MPs”.

This, one might observe, is over six years ago, more than a year before the EU referendum, and a year before the Telegraph’s timeline. And the all-party report was unequivocal. The chairman of the group, Stoke-on-Trent MP Rob Flello, said that considerable obstacles remained in terms of attracting workers in the 16-24 age bracket to the logistics industry, particularly at HGV driver level, despite almost one million young people not being in employment, education or training – the so-called NEETs.

The group’s research had found that just two percent of all HGV drivers were under the age of 25, with 60 percent over 45. “There is a huge disparity between these two groups – we have so many people over 45 and over 60, and almost none under 25”, Flello told MPs and industry figures assembled for the report’s launch.

“It is also striking”, he said, “that there are actually slightly more managing directors in transport and distribution businesses that are under the age of 25 than there are HGV drivers, which just shows how many barriers there are to getting young people driving”.

From this, the government did not walk away unscathed. The haulage sector, the report said, had suffered from repeated governments’ focus on university education over and above vocational courses. “Logistics is too often considered to be a job of last resort. Through pursuit of this agenda and highlighting university places as a marker for education quality, government may have devalued skills that are crucial to the economy”.

This had combined with an institutional failure to provide young people with adequate career guidance, the report noted, pointing to a recent CBI report which concluded: “The quality of careers advice in schools remains in severe crisis. For 93 out of 100 young people to not feel in possession of the facts they need to make informed choices about the future is a damning indictment”.

Spelling out the detail, the report emphasised the “ticking time bomb” aspect, highlighted in a submission by Skills for Logistics: “A fifth of the current LGV workforce will reach retirement age in the next ten years. That’s approximately 75,000 drivers and this does not include those that will have licences revoked or curtailed or even those that will leave the professions for other job opportunities”.

This then continued: “But the number gaining a licence is decreasing year-on-year. The data shows (sic) a 45 percent fall in the number obtaining a LGV licence in a five-year period, and it appears that only 20 percent are acquiring their initial driver CPC. This therefore does not come close to replacing those that are anticipated to leave the profession”.

At least now, the Telegraph is reporting that fewer than 10,000 European lorry drivers left the UK workforce after Brexit, according to the ONS. Thus, only one in five drivers who dropped out since the referendum were EU nationals. This rather puts Brexit back in the bottle.

But what we are not hearing is that the problem was known well before the referendum, the government had been warned, ministers had been engaged and even chancellor Osborne had been put on notice that something needed to be done.

Yet, as with the gas storage issue, nothing was done then, by the Cameron administration, nor by successive governments. Perversely, the parliamentary report to which the Telegraph refers was published on 29 July 2016, just over a month after the referendum.

The report stated: “It is widely accepted, including by the Government, that there is a shortage of drivers that ranges from about 45,000–60,000 depending on the source of the data. For every driver the sector needs there are three people in the UK with a valid LGV licence who could do the work but two in three choose not to”.

Even then, the report said, “Concern about a shortage of drivers is not new”. Yet, predictable and predicted though it was, the issue slipped through the cracks, despite it being obvious that there was a serious problem which was not going to go away. Now, after years of neglect, the crisis is upon us. And all the Muppets can do is blame Brexit.

Just to put the lid on this bit of stupidity, we see that the Italian logistics industry has called on its government to increase the work permit quota for foreigners so as to lessen driver shortage. The sector, we are told, needs 17,000 drivers, but there is an urgent need for at least five thousand drivers now.

And, as far as I am aware, Italy is still in the EU.