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Reporters are a bit like great white sharks — they have to keep moving in order to survive. But that means some stories, after a brief moment of intense public scrutiny, get left behind. Nobody hears how they ended — or, indeed, if they ended at all.
So it was with the great UK truck driver shortage of 2021, which led to empty supermarket shelves, sudden recruitment and retention bonuses for drivers, and talk of drafting in the army. Remainers saw the chaos as proof that Brexit had been a mistake. Brexiters saw the pay bump for drivers as vindication of the idea that migrants had held down wages. But what happened next?
The short answer is that pandemic-related disruptions eased off, drivers got more money, and the acute shortage went away. Between 2020 and 2023, hourly median pay for full-time “large goods vehicle drivers” rose 27 per cent to £14.99, according to official statistics, compared with a 16 per cent rise in median hourly pay for all full-time employees to £17.60. The proportion of HGV businesses reporting HGV driver vacancies dropped from 43 per cent at the end of 2021 to 18 per cent at the end of 2023.
But vacancies have been creeping up again, which brings us to the longer answer: many of the underlying problems behind the shortage have not been resolved.
The first is pay. Whether or not truck drivers feel they are climbing the wage ladder depends on whether they look up, at the reduced gap with the median earner, or down, at the shrinking gap between their profession and the minimum wage. Both Conservative and Labour governments have pushed up the wage floor sharply over the past decade, shrinking the differential with more skilled roles. In 2011, median hourly pay for full-time HGV drivers was 62 per cent higher than the minimum wage. That premium had dropped to just 35 per cent by 2020. It recovered to almost 50 per cent over the following two years, but shrank back to 38 per cent by 2024.
Drivers mention this a lot, says Adrian Jones of the union Unite. “There is a differential, a reward for skills, knowledge and experience, and that’s what’s being eroded,” he said. “We’ve got drivers that are on £13, £14 an hour, they’re looking at the minimum wage [which will rise to £12.21 for over-21s in April] and saying ‘why do I bother putting up with this?’”
Outside of pay, there has been no improvement in the long and unpredictable hours. Take a current HGV driver advert from Ocado, which states: “You will be required to work a flexible shift pattern consisting of nights, late and early shifts including weekends.” The minimum contracted hours are 32 or 40 but “routes are assigned up to 12.5 hours per day, as such you will regularly be expected to carry out additional hours”.
Kieran Smith, chief executive of Driver Require, a recruitment agency, says these working patterns, which are hard to balance with family life, or even with friends and hobbies, are prompting many drivers to leave in their 20s and 30s. Just training up more drivers is pointless when the real issue is “one of churn”, he told me.
There are new challenges too. Employers, probably with the best of intentions, are installing algorithmically-powered cameras to monitor drivers’ eyelids and head postures for signs of sleepiness or distraction. But Jones says many drivers hate the feeling of being watched all the time.
What does all this tell us about Brexit? A reduction in drivers from the EU, which coincided with other pandemic-related disruptions, probably did deliver a pay bump for truck drivers. But Brexit hasn’t solved all their problems. Indeed, most of them aren’t unique to the UK: industry body IRU reports an ageing workforce and driver shortage in many regions of the world.
For Unite, the answer is new industry-negotiated standards on pay and conditions, to stop companies from competing by squeezing labour costs. “We need to get away from this fractured system of outsourcing and contracting where you can have a high street retailer using 10 different companies, all paying different rates, undercutting each other to get work,” said Jones.
The Labour government is in favour of sectoral collective bargaining, but it has promised a nervous business community it will go slowly, beginning with social care. And there would surely be trade-offs: better quality jobs and a more resilient supply chain would come at the price of higher transport costs. The truck driver shortage briefly illuminated this choice in 2021, but Britain has opted to limp along until the next crisis, when the invisible will become visible yet again.
sarah.oconnor@ft.com