UK transport industry forced to train army of local drivers to deal with Brexit

He’s just 25, but Lewis Judd looks natural driving a 40-tonne lorry, carrying out a tricky reversing maneuver at the East Midlands Haulage company’s practice yard where he hopes to soon have a full-time job. .

Under the watchful eye of his instructor, Judd successfully backs the cab of his truck, bringing the tractor and trailer together with a satisfying click. If all goes as planned, within a month he will be driving solo for Lincolnshire-based company FreshLinc.

“My dad was a lorry driver so it’s probably in the blood,” said Judd, who until a few weeks ago was a window washer earning £10.50 an hour on a zero hours contract . He can now expect to earn £30,000 a year after qualifying, rising to £40,000 if he’s willing to do weekends and overnight trips.

Judd will join a new post-Brexit army of local truckers that the UK haulage industry has been forced to train ever since a severe shortage of drivers closed petrol stations and emptied supermarket shelves in 2021.

Two years after this crisis, industry leaders and professional logistics bodies report that the crisis has triggered a restructuring of the driver industry leading to increased costs and wage increases of 20-30% compared to before.pandemic levels, but also a more stable pipeline of young UK drivers.

“I’m not sure this is exactly a Brexit ‘success story’,” said FreshLinc boss Lee Juniper, who has trained nearly 200 drivers since opening his own on-site driving school there. at 18 months. “We solved the problem, but we had to pay through the nose for it.”

Juniper added that despite higher costs, the results of the disruption are not all bad, with the company reducing its reliance on often unreliable temporary drivers, making it easier to manage staff turnover and reducing damage to its fleet of trucks through better driving.

Although higher wages for drivers have added to consumer price pressures, carriers have also faced similar or greater cost pressures in other areas – repairs, tires, fuel and the surge the price of AdBlue exhaust fluid required for diesel engines.

Paul Day, managing director of Turners Soham, a Cambridgeshire trucking firm with 2,500 trucks which has also trained many of its own drivers who previously relied heavily on EU drivers, said the supply of drivers had grown stabilized – but with side effects.

“The financial implications of the huge pay increases trickled down to the maintenance engineers,” he said, explaining that many mechanics already held heavy-duty licenses to move trucks around the yard and then returned to the job. road when wages soared in 2021.

“This has forced mechanics’ salaries to increase, so transport costs have increased significantly over the past two years. It hurt the UK economy, but that’s where we are,” Day added.

The 2021 crisis was triggered by the triple whammy of the economy which came back to life after pandemic shutdowns just as around 15,000 EU drivers left the UK due to Brexit and Covid, alongside changes to self-employment tax laws that caused some older drivers to quit.

Companies have responded by raising wages, with companies such as FreshLinc and Turners training more of their own drivers. The industry has also been helped by government intervention, including a £34million skills ‘boot camp’ scheme, which was renewed for another year in March. The availability of drive tests has also improved, with the DVSA conducting a mean 9,500 HGV road checks per month, compared to an average of around 6,000 per month in 2019, according to the Ministry of Transport.

“The government has definitely taken notice of the problem, and boot camps and other things have certainly had an impact,” said Rod McKenzie, executive director of the Road Haulage Association, a trade body.

With HGV training costing between £3,500 and £5,000 per driver, the skills boot camp scheme has been invaluable in encouraging young people to get into the business, according to James Clifford, managing director of HGVC, a supplier of training which provided part of the programme.

Boot camp funds are also available for companies to partially subsidize their own in-house training, Clifford said, encouraging companies that were previously reluctant to invest in training because they feared new drivers would simply be poached. by rivals.

Although the RHA and Logistics UK, the trade lobby, say there remains a theoretical shortfall of 50,000 lorry drivers in the UK, the existing pool of drivers has stabilized at around 275,000, which is sufficient to meet to current needs.

This is partly because the transportation industry is no longer rushing to meet demand. In the UK, as elsewhere, consumers are buying less because of inflation.

Tightening supply chains have also caused many retailers to rationalize the number of product lines they display, thereby reducing shipping needs, according to Kieran Smith, managing director of Driver Require, a staffing agency.

Day at Turners of Soham estimated volumes were down 6-8% this year, while Logistics UK found that 64% of its members said they had reduced the size of their fleet when renewing their membership this year. Day predicted that 2023 would be a “difficult year” for the sector.

According to Jack Kennedy, an economist at Indeed, the recruitment site, salary increases for truck drivers and job postings have also eased markedly. Job vacancies for truck drivers peaked at 80% above pre-pandemic levels in 2021, but were now 34% below that pre-pandemic baseline.

Looking ahead, the industry has mixed views on its resilience when demand picks up, but few expect a repeat of the 2021 crisis.

Industry leaders say they still face medium-term vulnerabilities from unsociable working hours and inadequate road facilities which discourage recruits, as well as from Brexit which removed access to a flexible pool of EU drivers that previously provided a buffer at peak times, such as Christmas.

“The industry is certainly not bulletproof. There is still a significant shortage of drivers in the UK,” said James Russell, managing director of wholesale distributors AF Blakemore & Son, who has also invested heavily in training. “If there was some kind of renewed pressure, the less prepared parts of the industry could still be strained quite quickly.”

But Day said a full-scale crisis was unlikely, in part because recent experience had taught big companies to be more flexible in their demands.

“If demand suddenly comes back 6-8%, we would be in a rush again and drivers would be scarce,” he said. “But we can probably cope with that increase in demand if it just goes through the economic cycle.”