This tweet is worth sharing. I have checked the story in Motor Transport, which appears reputable:
https://twitter.com/bloggerheads/status/1422536917380440065?s=21
So, what is happening?
First, it would seem as if a D notice has been issued to prevent this story being discussed. That the supply chain might get worse is not being mentioned in the media.
Second, if the Road Haulage Association is to be believed the government is doing nothing to prevent this crisis.
Third, you might almost believe that the government wants a story that is very clearly related to Brexit to be related to Covid instead.
What is actually happening? It would seem that three things are.
First, there is denial in government of the scale of the issue that they have unleashed with Brexit.
Second, there is willing to make excuses, rathe than take action.
Third, I rather strongly suspect that they think that they can sacrifice Grant Shapps to this one, and Johnson will survive again.
But if food supply moves from being an inconvenience, which it is now, to becoming a serious issue, which it seems that the Road Haulage Association thinks it might be, will the public be foolish enough to just think this the result of the pingdemic when simultaneously it is claimed that the number of cases is falling and the sensitivity of contacting has been reduced? I doubt it. I think they will smell a rat and decide that this is not a Covid issue.
All governments have to ride their luck. Johnson certainly has. However, evidence from Conservative Home suggests that even within the Tories Johnson's own popularity is waning now. In that case it is very likely it is elsewhere.
So, will the backlash against a government whose ability to keep any promise is so obviously limited begin when food shortages become real, and the panic the media are obviously trying to avoid sets in? It may.
I just hope that it is understood that the issue is Brexit though, because it is. This is not Covid issue. Time will tell.
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The obsession with what is close to a ‘no deal’ Brexit and all that it entails is going to lead to absolute misery and possibly public disorder. With the government’s desire to repress and become more authoritarian and corrupt, along with hunger (famine) and poverty, you have the formula for most revolutions. Revolutions rarely end well for anyone.
The RHA have provided data that indicates 15% of the driver shortage is due to Brexit. You do have to read quite deeply to find that. There is still a problem of course, and any short term alleviation is helpful.
So it’s interesting though that one of their proposals is to allow temporary visas to be provided to European HGV drivers. That’s a little bit dodgy in terms of racism and BLM supporters would be all over that if the proposal got analysed down. The correct proposal is to allow temporary visas to be provided for HGV drivers from any continent in the world if they can get here.
The link to the RHA is not clickable. Here it is again:
https://t.co/9nJU6fGFOu#GrantShapps pic.twitter.com/3OXBHn9c2e
Glad I planted all those runner beans this year.
In my experience humans are very bad at foreseeing huge shocks – we have a tendency to believe that tomorrow will look like today. It is why it’s so difficult to get action on climate change. Even though we see evidence every night on the TV, we don’t do anything. Similarly, a pandemic was high up on the risks we faced but we did nothing to prepare. The RHA interview/story warns of food shortages…. but we do nothing.
It is a natural human failing…… but we expect our Government to do better…. and they are not.
Correction to my earlier comment: I’ve checked further and Richard Burnett of the RHA is lobbying for temporary visas for ‘overseas’ truckers, and has no wish to discriminate in favour of Europeans. He has been misrepresented in the piece in Motor Transport, ‘which appears reputable’ apparently.
Thank you for this very interesting post, it led me to the RHA site and to read their recent report on the shortage, the reasons hauliers gave for it, and the proposed actions the government needs to take. It’s recommendations match exactly the text in the email you posted but the report does flesh out a bit more detail.
Thank you for your wonderful work. As an aside I was sad to learn about the state of the TJN and
John Christensen’s stepping down, I loved his interviews on the TJN podcast.
https://www.rha.uk.net/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=ICI0C-FWmVo%3d&portalid=0×tamp=1627564639720
Thanks
I am hoping the Podcast survives, but think it very undervalued by current TJN management, which given it one of the best things TJN does right now is an indication of the problem faced
And will someone tell me why the price of petrol has risen so astronomically when the price of oil is far from exceptionally high. I remember the days when it was a daily news item at a much lower price- used to beat up the then Labour Government of course.
The current price rise will be a significant factor in rising inflation.
Could that be anything to do with the fact that BP have just announced a share buyback and increased dividends? I own BP shares – so it’s all my fault. Sorry.
The current problem is, of course, Brexit, becaue many European drivers have stopped driving in this country. However the problem is far deeper than that and has existed for some considerable time. The European drivers came here because they were offered work with pay and conditions that many drivers in this country would not accept.
Haulage companies mainly stopped appointing apprentices and recruited only trained drivers who had to maintain their HGV licences at their own cost. The pay levels were not far above minimum wage and the working conditions appalling, sleeping in their ‘workplace’ and trying to find reasonable food at ‘truckstops’. Then the haulage companies decided to abrogate their responsibilities as employers and demand that their drivers be self employed. Most worked through umbrella companies. Who fleeced them.
The current shortage should have been foreseen and the stopgap of using cheap European drivers was only ever a stopgap. What is needed is government funded training, appropriate salaries and proper working time and working conditions regulation. Which will, of course, result in greatly increased prices for everything.
I respectfully suggest that the illusion in your comment is longstanding, and twofold.
First that somehow or other, British people will be persuaded to do work they consistently fail to show any inclination to do. It is no just haulage that relies on European labour. The same is true of the ‘soft fruit’ industry, just for example. soft fruit harvest picking relies on European seasonal labour. This is hard manual labour, and the British have shown neither the inclination nor the endurance to do it to an appropriate standard. The more general and deeper problem is not new, but endemically longstanding. The canals and railways in the UK would never have been built, if the Irish ‘navigators’ had not arrived in large numbers to carry out work British people were seriously disinclined to undertake in sufficient numbers. It is wrong to assume it is solely a matter of pay, or facilities; it is the nature of certain work itself and the (lack of) assisting technology, that relies instaed on hard, repetitive, unremitting (and often stultifyingly boring) physical labour.
Second, is the problem of “greatly increased prices”, on the dubious assumption that you could somehow make deeply unattractive work to the British labour force attractive for a sufficient number of British people though increased pay and conditions., to make this viable. Here the problem is not solved, but merely shifted. To the specific point the cost structure required to attract the workforce, intersects with the price people are prepared to pay for the output. What is more likely to happen is that fewer people will choose to buy soft fruit, and the market for soft fruit will simply shrink.
Now, this I believe. Similar to the hospitality industry. Employers sack their workforce, workforce looks elsewhere, employers complain about lack of skilled workforce. Yes, it’s Covid & its Brexit, but fundamentally it’s the industry itself.
There are four combining threats:
Shortage of HGV space
Costs of container shipment (roughly 4 fold increase in cost)
Availability of shipping
Barriers to safety certification due to HMG failing to replace EU system
There are some workarounds to these for low volume high value products, but the mass market is stuffed. Buy your gifts for Christmas NOW.
Well, myself and my wife have been wanting to lose weight, so……
I suspect the civil service has been purged now of Ivan Rogers types willing to put their careers on the line to tell truth to power. And that whispers of such a supply collapse are regarded as Remainer backsliding.
How bad could it get? Well we’re probably about to see a stockpiling crisis once it becomes clear there’s not enough for everyone.
It’s worth remembering too that many people are on restricted diets and can’t simply switch from lettuce to cabbage if there are shortages. And that this could hit medicine or other less fungible goods.
Remember during the fuel strike when the govt caved because it was beginning to hit grocery supplies, people where starting to panic buy and they feared food riots?
Where has that fear gone? The civil service should remember and be reminding ministers. But it seems they are not listening because the solution, visas for EU drivers, is unpalatable. They won’t like societal breakdown because Gaz & Shaz can’t buy nuggets for their kids, or anything at all for that matter. It could get very ugly very quickly with an insufficiently quick fix available.
What do they do? Ban Amazon or Ebay deliveries and make all their drivers drive food trucks instead? Do they have enough drivers? Enough with HGV licenses? What about the insurance issues?
Waiting for the riots is too late, far too late. We are governed by irresponsible children.
https://www.thelondoneconomic.com/politics/food-thrown-away-because-brexit-labour-shortages-284301/
When Romanians think they will be better off in Romania working across the whole of the EU , one has to ask what are the chances of EU lorry drivers wanting to return to the UK even temporarily? After all they have just all left because of Brexit. Many of the UK’s own haulage companies have relocated to the EU to work Europe rather than the UK as there is a larger market now given that trying to trade between UK and EU is just too difficult. Yet all the UK ever hears about is the Northern Ireland Protocol and how difficult it is to trade with NI from the UK, yet aside from the GFA , NI is in a much better position then the rest of the UK as they can still trade easily with the EU so can just re-source goods/services etc from outside the UK. So eventually even though the border will still be between NI and the rest of the UK it will, I assume, cease to be an issue as nothing will be crossing from the UK to the EU . Assume NI can get drugs /sausages etc from the EU market? 600 million opportunities the UK has just thrown down the drain whilst still looking for post Brexit opportunities!
Hmmmm – is this being done to deliberately create inflation?
And will interest rates rise as a result?
I’m already hearing the ‘blame-ocracy’ at work – apparently its the paperwork (BREXIT related but never mentioned) and fining drivers for being over-weight or for tachograph violations) that’s doing it.
Inflation will follow
Interest rates should not
Gammons see the light? One, they are not really used to seeing the light and two, the media won’t help elucidate. It’ll be the EU to blame, just as 50%+ of the electorate think the EU is to blame for the NI problems, though that’s all down to the bad faith of Bunter and his thick little Lord. A few google clicks and the truth is available, but gammons rely on their gutter rags as ever and shouty people like Garage.
I know the origin of the term gammon
But I do not like it
Might we avoid it please?
Due warning given….
[…] By Richard Murphy, a chartered accountant and a political economist. He has been described by the Guardian newspaper as an “anti-poverty campaigner and tax expert”. He is Professor of Practice in International Political Economy at City University, London and Director of Tax Research UK. He is a non-executive director of Cambridge Econometrics. He is a member of the Progressive Economy Forum. Originally published at Tax Research UK […]
Mmmm. I left the septic isle long before Brevid was a thing, however I follow the daily shenanigans with glee. The main theme, if you take the aggregate of news headlines, is that you currently appear to be in a science fiction story (or an episode of Doctor Who) and are heading to hell in a hand basket/cart. There appears to be a great effort by (no names) to place the genpop in an airstrip one state of fear, so they can be easily manipulated (chapter 13) before being used as data cows for big money (shock ending). Let’s face it, you’ve got a one party state (Scotland hopefully exempting itself soon) because Labour isn’t working. Once the queen shuffles the mortal, you’re going to see some serious sh**. ( sequel).
As some one who spent some time driving LGV and PSV for a while I can support a lot of the points Cyndy Hodgson makes and point out that given how most employers and customers treat drivers no amount of money would ever intice me to return not laziness or decline to work. The UK for many years had a rapidly aging umber of LGV drivers who were closing on retirement age. It was no longer seen as a desirable job, for a young person especially, when you have to pay multiple thousnds to obtain your licence and for your ongoing training to maintain it.
Having spent all that money you will be placed in control of a vehicle that can cost in the region of £150,000 before you even put a load onboard. Unless you are very lucky your employer will not pay for parking at a truckstop/services where you can use the toilet and get a shower/wash and reasonable meal. Most industrial estates have no parking rules and council provided parking areas have been redeveloped many years ago. So will generally park in laybys etc. You generally find these are happy hunting grounds for the criminal fraternity and it is not unknown to wake up with the trailer curtain slashed ( even if you leave the back doors open to show you have no load) and part of your load missing or scattered about the parking space, and a good chance your diesel has been syphoned off.
You will sleep in your cab, use a bottle to pee in, and a bag for a poo hence why most laybys smell of pee and the bin is overflowing with bags/bottles . If you are lucky your employer will have specced your vehicle with a microwave and a fridge the size of a coolbox so you can make a meal but most go for the basic no frills low cost option . Washing is generally with wet wipes. Also cabs are increasingly equipped with inward facing cctv for road safety. Thay say they are not an 24 hours but not sure.
If delivering to the likes of Tesco/Asda or any other major warehouse you a given a delivery slot of 15 minutes duration, if you miss it you could lose the day. Even if you are on time don’t expect to be unloaded any time soon as your trailer is a free extension of warehouse space and demurrage is no longer paid. As a driver you hand in your keys and paperwork and will be shoved in a room that last got cleaned 6 months ago, has maybe 1 functioning partially clean toilet, and if you are lucky has a vending machine with indate food/drink ( HSE and RHA think this is ok) while you wait to be unloaded and released.
So having paid for your own licence and ongoing mandatory courses evry 3 years what can you expect to be paid? You will see headline figures of £35,000 to £40,000pa but that is working the maximum legal hours of 70 per week (includes your 45 hrs per week max driving) which will include a couple of 15/16 hour days followed by reduced 9 hr between shift rest according to EU regs – UK regs are even worse. Most of that salary is made up of bonus – drops/collections, fuel usage, and meal allowances etc non of which are included in your holiday pay etc. So you can imagine what the hourly rate is. As to self employed a lot of agencies/ employers wouldnt take you on less you agreed to go on and generally offered £1 per hour extra. Many had no choice and now face massive bills of many thousands to HMRC ( IR35 rings a bell) the biggest of which I personally know is £18,000. Thankfully I never did but could see the way the industry was going and left.
The driver shortage has been going on for the past 15-20 years that I know of. Just look at the Commercial Motor archiveetc for back issues and you will see similar driver shortage figures year on year. Its not new but has made made worse by Brexit/Covid. There are no easy solutions because nobody has ever bothered in the industry/unions/government to address it for years and the RHA and FTA as employers organisations were happy to exploit hard working and skilled EU drivers many of whom I was happy to call co-workers and friends.
In other words, neoliberal attitudes destroyed this supply chain
Business has itself to blame
Thanks for the comment
Yes – and its about £3000.00 to learn to drive a HGV now – in a an economy denuded of cash, who’d shell that out?
I’ve had neighbours who used to work on petrol tankers earning £36K a year in the 1980’s!
Contrast that with the tanker drivers who work for Tesco and Sainsburys who were on £22K and lower so that car drivers can get cheap petrol that is used to entice shoppers into the stores (fuel was often used as a ‘loss leader’).
Sean is dead right about the rest – my brother stopped his intercontinental work because he just couldn’t get the number of trips in to make it pay any more after BREXIT. Everything takes too long. He had trouble in London finding places to park up at night because of rogue clamping operators for example who caught him out twice.
Europe treats the job more professionally on the whole (I’ve been to European truck stops and seen how they do things – even the truck stops are better quality and even factories and warehouses had showers for drivers to use once they’d dropped off their loads) but there are operators for example who used to send out trucks with two East European drivers and no sleeper cab who could undercut other operators. It’s got to be a cut-throat business that needs the RHA pushing out of the way and re-regulating as it also undermines other modes of transport such as rail and coastwise shipping.
Road haulage needs hauling into the 21st century in my view.
Thanks for the reply Richard and sorry didn’t mean to go on such a ramble. It upsets me though that the RHA for example are portraying this as a new thing unique to the circumstances of Brexit and Covid.
I have no issue with business as a general principle. Any sensible business should keep a close eye on costs, turnover, cash flow etc if they want a sustainable business model but it seems the new way is to extract maximum short term profit to boost director bonus never mind the long term damage done as the people at the top seem to move elsewhere pretty quickly.
It’s not much of a model though when –
1 Your staff turnover goes through the roof and you can’t recruit replacements.
2 Your suppliers stop dealing with you because you demand such low prices and impose such long term credit terms.
3 Your customers start walking away because you provide poor service.
Stobarts for example did much to raise the public image of haulage but was generally not well liked in the industry. By his own admission be loss led on new contracts in the hope of boosting the price on renewal and worked on wafer thin profit margins. He also said he preferred the property development side of identifying new depots warehouses and undertaking sell and leaseback when built to generate cash for growth. The standing joke was he made more money selling toy lorries than running real ones. Unfortunately it became true and when he could no longer generate the cash because he had nothing left to sell it all came to an end for him and he passed the business on for nothing.
Successful capitalism depends on regulation. That is the main conclusion of this very interesting discussion. The more monopoly power of the main supermarkets and food suppliers, the easier to transfer increased costs to the customer and therefore food price inflation. So everything is interrelated. Dealing with the problems of one industry requires analysis of and willingness to deal with all its interconnections. Hence the need for a different government to the present one.
The distinctive contribution of neoliberalism to economics has been to destroy even the prospect of the appropriate supervision or regulation of capitalism. Neoliberalism has always achieved its goals insidiously. A simple example is that from the 1970s-1980s; neoliberals simply freely acquired for itself (with no justification whatsoever), the name of the greatest established name in economics, for its own purposes; with the creation of neoliberal, so-called ‘Adam Smith Institute’ (ASI) think-tank (the prevalent modern think-tanks themselves, as supposedly ‘independent’ bodies of expert knowledge were to a great extent the calculated idea of the Mont Pelerin Society to turn mere ideology into the pure gold of ‘received incontrovertible wisdom’; and they have corrosively undermined the credibility of genuine expertise in the process).
Adam Smith was no Neoliberal; he saw capital as given to monstrous perversions of liberty: “People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” (Wealth of Nations, Book I, Ch.X). The Adam Smith Institute has even attempted to disarm the significance of Smith’s point by claiming it is a “misreading”, because Smith goes on to explore the real difficulties in successfully regulating the determination of capital to form conspiracies (ASI website, 23rd September, 2010). Adam Smith was a subtle thinker, but it is merely a vulgar perversion of critical analysis to attempt to construe this as a ‘misreading’; but there you have the methods of neoliberalism laid bare.
Adam Smith also saw employers as involved in a conspiracy to prevent wage increases; the point is, Adam Smith’s acute sense of the danger of capitalism left to regulate itself is deeply rooted in his thought. He had difficulty finding ready answers in the 18th century society in which he lived (neoliberalism lives permanently in the petrified amber of the 1930s); but the idea that all such ideas depend a ‘misreading’ of Adam Smith are simply false; and a monstrous misuse of Adam Smith. Do not fall for it. Perversion of insight is all neoliberalism has to offer. Neoliberalism has failed, and it is ruining the world.
John
Your insights and thinking is appreciated
Richard
“Oh what a tangled web we weave/
When first we practice to deceive”.
And fundamentally this is where lying gets you. Once a government is a stranger to the Truth the the Truth cannot be uttered without bringing down the entire house of cards.
The U.K. allegedly left the EU to “take back control”, because the EU was inherently undemocratic and because of migration issues related to free movement.
Well we can see that taking back control has consequences especially for a government what still hasn’t implemented full customs controls on incoming goods and which refuses to acknowledge that Brexit has consequences.
And then we have the sad irony of the unelected Lord Frost, a former bureaucrat, and now a Minister of the Crown, leading negotiations with the EU on behalf of the U.K. government. Democracy indeed.
And the spectacle of EU workers now being replaced by workers from Asia and elsewhere, arriving in the U.K. on foot of visas issued by the Home Office. So migration continues but not of the kind that many Brexiteers wanted.
The U.K. isn’t unique in facing a shortage of HGV drivers. It is unique in terms of the scale of the shortage and the associated ongoing disaster which is Brexit. It is also unique in having a government that is adverse to the Truth and refuses to take action to protect its own people.
The U.K. government is also mirroring Poland and Hungary in an overt attack on democracy in terms of the judicial system, general oversight by Parliament and related mechanisms and emerging corruption on a grand scale.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave/
When first we practice to deceive”.
A great many excellent and informative posts on this topic. The most worrying thing is the failure to see this reported by the BBC. What is going on?
What has the Road Haulage Association been doing over the last, say, 10 years, to ensure that the UK had and has the HGV drivers it requires? Anything?
Good question
Something I came across a pointer to – a Scottish resident Pole’s take on the UK’s HGV driver shortage: https://orynski.eu/20-reasons-why-there-is-shortage-of-drivers-in-the-uk/
Thanks for linking the 20 Reasons Why There is Shortage of Drivers .
Noticed someone in the comments for the article mentioned the change in IR35 making it 21 Reasons Why ! Could someone please explain for a dummy what IR35 actually means in practice. Looked up IR35 and tried to have a read through but I am not sure I still understand what this means for lorry drivers can anyone help me understand thanks.
https://www.contractoruk.com/news/0015112ir35_reform_fuelling_100000_hgv_driver_shortage.html
Too long tonight…sorry
I am afraid that a lot of chickens will come home to roost here.
The shortage of drivers will no doubt lead to an overdue rise in drivers wages and hopefully an improvement in working conditions.
Will this lead to demandes for shorter hours and reduction in output. Very likely
Reading the OP & comments I am surprised that someone on here hasn’t tried to link the supply chain collapse to “climate change.”
France have just declared a 1 month national strike due to Macron’s “covid” rules. This has to be the single biggest factor, surely?