There’s a lorry driver shortage in the UK.
Dairy farmers are being told to dump their milk.
You and 28 other farmers have got to pull the plug because we haven’t got any drivers.
We’ve lost two drivers
and some haven’t turned up.
In some shops the shelves are empty.
Without products there’s no business because you need to have the products to sell.
With empty shelves like this, no-one is going to come into the shop anyway.
It’s a problem now.
It’s a problem looking ahead.
Stock is becoming a bit of an issue for us.
Everyday items from playdough, to dolls figures, to dolls houses
is becoming a bit of problem getting the stock in
or guaranteeing that we are going to be able to get it for Christmas.
The question is
why is this happening?
This is Nicola Sturgeon’s response.
I really do think Conservatives should take some responsibility
because it is entirely inflicted by their obsession with Brexit.
The Conservatives though don’t agree.
To say that this is just an issue of Brexit is completely untrue.
What it is about, Mr Speaker is coronavirus.
Well to assess this we should start with the industry itself.
One estimate says 90,000 lorry drivers are needed.
The UK’s Road Haulage Association asked its members why.
58% said... Brexit.
The industry had for years relied heavily on drivers from the European Union.
And as market researchers Transport Intelligence point out:
Numbers from the Office for National Statistics
certainly show a drop in driver numbers.
there were 40,000 in the UK at the start of the pandemic from the EU.
That number has now fallen by 15,000.
Crucially though 50,000 UK-based drivers have left the profession.
Three times more than the fall in EU drivers.
Also, those European drivers who did leave could have stayed.
They may have left indirectly because of Brexit but they didn’t have to.
They may have left because of Covid or other reasons.
And look at this map. The UK isn’t the only country with driver shortages.
The countries shaded darkest here have the highest number of vacancies.
Germany is third.
The UK second.
Poland, in the EU, is first.
It has 120,000 vacancies.
The BBC’s Adam Easton explains some of the reasons.
They say there are not enough incentives to attract younger Polish drivers
and it's expensive to obtain a licence.
Rather than spend weeks on the road abroad,
often younger drivers prefer to stay closer to home,
delivering parcels for increasingly popular courier services.
And these shortages inside the EU have been noted.
David Campbell Bannerman is a former UKIP MEP. He tweeted:
This though doesn’t look definite.
Because there are two parts to this.
Why the shortages happened, and why the UK is struggling to respond.
David Hennig is a trade expert. He notes:
And this is maybe how best to see this shortage.
Brexit is not the primary cause for the initial drop in driver numbers.
But Brexit has complicated how the UK handles this shock.
Here’s one industry analyst explaining why.
There’s a bit of a reluctance amongst some mainland European carriers
to even come into the UK
because costs are unbalanced,
it’s difficult for them to know they will have a load to go back with.
The Brexit bureaucracy, the extra challenges around that are a part of it,
and then Covid disruptions as well.
Brexit has complicated recruitment.
Covid has done that too.
Here’s more from Alex Veitch from Logistics UK.
In a given year, about 70,000 people take a test to become a HGV driver.
Over the year 2020 to 2021 that’s been 25,000 roughly.
And this is simply because, under quite understandable and correct Covid safe rules,
it’s not been possible to sit an examiner
with somebody in the cab of a truck to take the tests.
The government argues Covid is a major factor.
It also argues though that we’re seeing a change in the labour market
and an increase in demand for British workers,
something the UK voted for in the Brexit referendum,
something it believes that’s to be welcomed.
We’re pleased to see that salaries for haulage drivers have been going up.
If they’re paid 20% more, or something like that,
I think that will be good for British workers and I thoroughly support it.
This is a shift in the UK labour market that the government wants.
And others are telling us to keep supply shortages in perspective.
Supermarkets are saying most products are still widely available,
here’s Tesco’s chairman.
There’s absolutely no reason for customers of Tesco
and indeed I suspect of other supermarket chains
to panic buy or anything like that.
I think it’s very easy to make a drama out of a modest crisis.
Despite these reassurances the supply issues and the driver shortages are happening,
in part because of Covid,
in part because of Brexit,
in part because younger workers aren’t keen to be drivers.
Other global factors matter too like US-China trade tensions.
Brexit is changing the UK’s economy but the world’s economy is changing at the same time.
Dan Kemp is an investment manager with Morningstar.
Really this all speaks to a new trend that we are seeing
which is a partial reversal in the globalisation that’s dominated the last 30 years
that’s kept prices low as supply chains have been optimised and globalised
and as that’s started to break down over the last couple of years
we’re seeing all of these symptoms emerge.
This is a story that goes beyond Brexit but that doesn’t mean Brexit is not a factor.
The break from the EU was designed in part to reset how labour works in the UK.
It’s now doing that.
And how the UK responds to these supply chain issues
is in part shaped by that rearrangement.
Whether that’s acceptable
will depend on your view of the longer-term changes Brexit is designed to deliver.