For months, the lack of truck drivers in the United Kingdom has hurt the country’s economy. Although and have been reduced after weeks of acute crisis, the situation is far from being completely resolved. And the sector association, Logistics UK, presented a report on Monday detailing the origin of the problem: the collapse of almost a quarter of the total number of truckers in the country, due to a mixture of the pandemic and Brexit. A situation that the sharp rise in wages in recent months has failed to resolve.
The data is very worrying for the British Government. In two years, between the second quarter of 2019 and 2021, the country has lost 23.4% of its truck drivers: from 308,000 to 236,000. But it stands out especially: 34.7% of community drivers who lived on the island crossed the English Channel to return to the mainland. In total, 13,000 of the 39,000 who worked there.
Although it was suspected that the drop in the number of truckers was due to early retirement due to the pandemic, the reality is that there have been more young people than older people who have left the sector. The average age of truck drivers has risen three years, from 47.9 to 50.8, which indicates that there is no generational renewal. And all this despite the rise in income: the average payment per hour worked, gross, rose by 7.8%, exceeding the accumulated inflation of these two years. And the association indicates that preliminary data for the third quarter suggest that the increase has accelerated and is already over 10%.
As if that were not enough, the pandemic disrupted the training of new drivers just when it was most needed: in the two quarters impacted by the confinements -spring 2020 and winter 2020-2021-, less than 500 people obtained the driving license of these vehicles, compared to 7,000 in a normal quarter, slowing down renewal even more.
crash plan
In response, the Government has offered £34.5m to train new drivers on an accelerated basis, as many companies are unable – or unwilling – to train their own workers. According to Rona Hunnisett, Head of Communications at Logistics UK, the problem is that the large number of SMEs in the sector do not have enough money to invest in training, and those that do fear that the employees they have trained will end up signing with the competition soon after , given the war that exists to steal truckers from each other.
Logistics UK assures that preliminary data from the end of 2021 indicate that the training of new drivers is accelerating, although the figures are still far from what is necessary to stabilize the distribution of goods throughout the country. And they trust that the investments of the State serve to accelerate the recovery.
The most positive thing is that the Christmas holidays have passed without major supply holes, as feared. The “plans B” of companies to fill their inventories have been enough to avoid a major crisis. Even so, according to a YouGov survey, 56% of Britons have personally suffered from shortages of some basic necessities in recent weeks. A much worse situation than the rest of the continent: this level of shortage has only affected just 7% of Spaniards or 16% of Swedes. The big question is whether this will be the “new normal” until all the trucks that have been left empty have drivers again.
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