Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is also what the Daily Mail constituency is beginning to notice too.
As I have just commented a trucker working in Europe said on 5 live this morning there are half a million drivers short across Europe
How many petrol stations will be closed by this evening?
How many people will go and do what I've thought of doing and filling up today? (I'm not going to... got enough... but going to have to plan journeys better for a while I reckon).
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
There's a "shortage of drivers" yet I can get four different drivers from different companies dropping off products at my front door in the same day.
Plenty of people in this country know how to drive and training to convert that to a HGV licence (if Testing bottlenecks are resolved) take weeks not years.
In an HGV or in a transit van?
You don't need an HGV licence to drive a transit and do the last mile delivery work for UPS / Hermes / Amazon / DPD..
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
He should pay more. However, paying more won't solve a shortage of drivers as untrained drivers can't start tomorrow. There is a lead time to train the drivers up.
So regardless of whether he pays more or not, as we said yesterday the only short term fix is to steal/borrow drivers from elsewhere (preferably Europe).
And there's no.particular reason to think that the training is the rate limiting step.
Imagine you are currently in a job. Or you are retired. I can imagine some people seeing headlines about the pay bonanza for truckers and making post haste for the nearest training centre, but not many.
A free free market is brilliant at allocating resources that are interchangeable and mobile. The stickier and harder to create the resources are, the more likely it is to get stuck in some horrible intermediate state.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
Well the lorry drivers interviewed on the Jeremy Vine radio call in the other day say otherwise about rises. A few headline figures does not represent the industry and those getting the 50K plus salaries are having to work every hour they are allowed including staying away from home several nights a week.
Nobody said it would be easy money. Truck drivers have a shit life. But even if we end up where the base salary for a trucker is £60k and they are treated with more respect, for so many of them it is still tramping up and down the country and staying away from the family.
My uncle-in-law is a retired ex-Hoyer driver. He used to like the freedom that came with driving fuel tankers around. But others didn't. And disappointingly for Philip (a) he isn't interested in coming back at any price and (b) his license is expired and it takes ages to get certified to drive fuel around. So "just pay more" and "just train more" remains a long term fix for an immediate term problem.
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
Can 32.7m drive petrol tankers in your imagination?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
There's a "shortage of drivers" yet I can get four different drivers from different companies dropping off products at my front door in the same day.
Plenty of people in this country know how to drive and training to convert that to a HGV licence (if Testing bottlenecks are resolved) take weeks not years.
In an HGV or in a transit van?
You don't need an HGV licence to drive a transit and do the last mile delivery work for UPS / Hermes / Amazon / DPD..
No, but if the person driving a transit is offered a really tempting salary then it only takes a few weeks for someone driving a transit to do the training required to sit the test for an HGV licence.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
And my license to drive anything up to 7.5 tons means I could go drive a 44 ton HGV tomorrow? Or a fuel tanker?
The reason why you are on here prattlng this nonsense, and nobody out there in the real world is implementing your very simple solutions is that there are straight out of the Muppet Show.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
And my license to drive anything up to 7.5 tons means I could go drive a 44 ton HGV tomorrow? Or a fuel tanker?
The reason why you are on here prattlng this nonsense, and nobody out there in the real world is implementing your very simple solutions is that there are straight out of the Muppet Show.
Not tomorrow, no.
But how long does it take to undertake the conversion training required? Years? Or weeks?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
Well the lorry drivers interviewed on the Jeremy Vine radio call in the other day say otherwise about rises. A few headline figures does not represent the industry and those getting the 50K plus salaries are having to work every hour they are allowed including staying away from home several nights a week.
Serious, sustainable wage rises mean serious, sustained price rises. That is the problem. In the end, it comes down to our willingness to foot the bill.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Depends if you want fuel delivered or not. Hoyer have had drivers poached by "just pay more" offers. You can't give your drivers a pay rise and think job done. The next offer comes along and off they go. You need drivers today but they have gone. You can pay even more to bring some back but that is no good for today's deliveries. And then the cycle begins again.
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
In medieval times, *maximum* wages were sometime legislated. They were trying this as late as Henry VIII.
Further, some workers were legally tied to their place of work - not just serfs... IIRC it was the 18th cent before the Scottish practise of making miners legally bound to their place of employment ended.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
Well the lorry drivers interviewed on the Jeremy Vine radio call in the other day say otherwise about rises. A few headline figures does not represent the industry and those getting the 50K plus salaries are having to work every hour they are allowed including staying away from home several nights a week.
Nobody said it would be easy money. Truck drivers have a shit life. But even if we end up where the base salary for a trucker is £60k and they are treated with more respect, for so many of them it is still tramping up and down the country and staying away from the family.
My uncle-in-law is a retired ex-Hoyer driver. He used to like the freedom that came with driving fuel tankers around. But others didn't. And disappointingly for Philip (a) he isn't interested in coming back at any price and (b) his license is expired and it takes ages to get certified to drive fuel around. So "just pay more" and "just train more" remains a long term fix for an immediate term problem.
I have a friend who's a UPS driver in the USA. He gets paid a six figure salary.
Pay whatever the market demands. If a trucker ends up on 60k or 100k or more, then that's the market rate.
But you want to ban "predatory" pay rises as the solution? 😂
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
There's a "shortage of drivers" yet I can get four different drivers from different companies dropping off products at my front door in the same day.
Plenty of people in this country know how to drive and training to convert that to a HGV licence (if Testing bottlenecks are resolved) take weeks not years.
In an HGV or in a transit van?
You don't need an HGV licence to drive a transit and do the last mile delivery work for UPS / Hermes / Amazon / DPD..
No, but if the person driving a transit is offered a really tempting salary then it only takes a few weeks for someone driving a transit to do the training required to sit the test for an HGV licence.
That doesn't solve today's problem though does it. It solves the problem X months down the line.
Large lorries (> 7.5 tonnes) are actually quit easy to drive, 99% of the time - especially long distance. He says that one problem is keeping your wits during the boredom of long motorway journeys. Especially if they're automatics (most large trucks are). Once you've got used to braking distances with and without loads, it's easy. Also, knowing where your corners are is important.
The skill is the 1% of the time: when you get to a depot and have to reverse into a narrow bay, or have to go down narrow lanes for a delivery. That takes skill and practice - and he says many existing drivers who just do depot-to-depot runs are pretty bad at this.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
There's a "shortage of drivers" yet I can get four different drivers from different companies dropping off products at my front door in the same day.
Plenty of people in this country know how to drive and training to convert that to a HGV licence (if Testing bottlenecks are resolved) take weeks not years.
In an HGV or in a transit van?
You don't need an HGV licence to drive a transit and do the last mile delivery work for UPS / Hermes / Amazon / DPD..
No, but if the person driving a transit is offered a really tempting salary then it only takes a few weeks for someone driving a transit to do the training required to sit the test for an HGV licence.
That doesn't solve today's problem though does it. It solves the problem X months down the line.
Or X weeks down the line.
Considering this so called problem has existed for six months, why have the employers moaning for six months been so utterly incapable of getting people through a six week training course?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
And my license to drive anything up to 7.5 tons means I could go drive a 44 ton HGV tomorrow? Or a fuel tanker?
The reason why you are on here prattlng this nonsense, and nobody out there in the real world is implementing your very simple solutions is that there are straight out of the Muppet Show.
Not tomorrow, no.
But how long does it take to undertake the conversion training required? Years? Or weeks?
For the number of HGV drivers required it will be Years - because we only have a limited number of HGV trainers and they were already fully booked due to the delayed tests.
Slightly offtopic but Eek Twin A needs to start driving lessons again in Leeds. The instructor we've been recommended is fully booked to late November (and that's if everyone passes).
And that is another limitation that cannot be instantly fixed regardless of your ideas.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
The skill is the 1% of the time: when you get to a depot and have to reverse into a narrow bay, or have to go down narrow lanes for a delivery. That takes skill and practice - and he says many existing drivers who just do depot-to-depot runs are pretty bad at this.
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Depends if you want fuel delivered or not. Hoyer have had drivers poached by "just pay more" offers. You can't give your drivers a pay rise and think job done. The next offer comes along and off they go. You need drivers today but they have gone. You can pay even more to bring some back but that is no good for today's deliveries. And then the cycle begins again.
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
If Hoyer have had their drivers poached then why haven't Hoyer paid more themselves? Hoyer are doing a specialist route that requires a specialist licence that should command a specialists pay rate on top.
That's like complaining that a brain surgeon has been poached by a GP Surgery. Why the heck would the hospital let the neurosurgeon walk out the door without beating the GPs offer?
Can't think of anything more peak remain than banning pay rises for HGV drivers ! Talk about the zeal of the convert...
I haven't seen anyone on here mentioning banning pay rises ( an optimal outcome, incidentally, for some of the plutocratic interests who originally birthed Brexit 30 years ago ) , rather more that they're not stopping us spiralling into an immediate crisis.
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Depends if you want fuel delivered or not. Hoyer have had drivers poached by "just pay more" offers. You can't give your drivers a pay rise and think job done. The next offer comes along and off they go. You need drivers today but they have gone. You can pay even more to bring some back but that is no good for today's deliveries. And then the cycle begins again.
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
If Hoyer have had their drivers poached then why haven't Hoyer paid more themselves? Hoyer are doing a specialist route that requires a specialist licence that should command a specialists pay rate on top.
That's like complaining that a brain surgeon has been poached by a GP Surgery. Why the heck would the hospital let the neurosurgeon walk out the door without beating the GPs offer?
Transport Secretary Grant Shapps says he will "move heaven and earth" to solve the HGV driver shortage but stops short of saying the Government will change the visa requirements for drivers in Europe to come to the UK.
The skill is the 1% of the time: when you get to a depot and have to reverse into a narrow bay, or have to go down narrow lanes for a delivery. That takes skill and practice - and he says many existing drivers who just do depot-to-depot runs are pretty bad at this.
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Depends if you want fuel delivered or not. Hoyer have had drivers poached by "just pay more" offers. You can't give your drivers a pay rise and think job done. The next offer comes along and off they go. You need drivers today but they have gone. You can pay even more to bring some back but that is no good for today's deliveries. And then the cycle begins again.
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
If Hoyer have had their drivers poached then why haven't Hoyer paid more themselves? Hoyer are doing a specialist route that requires a specialist licence that should command a specialists pay rate on top.
That's like complaining that a brain surgeon has been poached by a GP Surgery. Why the heck would the hospital let the neurosurgeon walk out the door without beating the GPs offer?
A lot of people don't want more money they are very happy just earning X amount of money. Once standard HGV driving got to that wage level, no additional money is going to tempt them back.
I'm not worried about the headlines leading to panic buying. We went through this with the empty shelves. The media are desperate to cause panic buying, but the public are immune to it now.
No they aren't, I'm off to texaco because my truck is only half full of diesel. When the panic buying starts the only logical move is to panic buy. See also "prisoner's dilemma" and "tragedy of the commons."
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Depends if you want fuel delivered or not. Hoyer have had drivers poached by "just pay more" offers. You can't give your drivers a pay rise and think job done. The next offer comes along and off they go. You need drivers today but they have gone. You can pay even more to bring some back but that is no good for today's deliveries. And then the cycle begins again.
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
If Hoyer have had their drivers poached then why haven't Hoyer paid more themselves? Hoyer are doing a specialist route that requires a specialist licence that should command a specialists pay rate on top.
That's like complaining that a brain surgeon has been poached by a GP Surgery. Why the heck would the hospital let the neurosurgeon walk out the door without beating the GPs offer?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
Mr. Malmesbury, I remember reading of minimum wages in the 14th century but maximum ones in the 17th.
There were both minimum and maximum wages in medieval times - often the legislation was of the form that job X pays Y. Which had the legal implication that paying less was illegal as well.
This was usual combined with legally mandated prices for various things. And not just staples. There were attempts to set maximum prices for luxuries such as fine wines. and even attempts to legislate what you could wear (by social class).
They all worked about as well as might be expected.
The central idea behind all of this was an attempt to impose stasis on society. To many in the medieval world (and into the Tudor world), the idea of growth and change was bad. It meant a change in The Order Of Things. The ideal society was unchanging....
Tests will also be made shorter by removing the ‘reversing exercise’ element – and for vehicles with trailers, the ‘uncoupling and recoupling’ exercise
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
There's a "shortage of drivers" yet I can get four different drivers from different companies dropping off products at my front door in the same day.
Plenty of people in this country know how to drive and training to convert that to a HGV licence (if Testing bottlenecks are resolved) take weeks not years.
In an HGV or in a transit van?
You don't need an HGV licence to drive a transit and do the last mile delivery work for UPS / Hermes / Amazon / DPD..
No, but if the person driving a transit is offered a really tempting salary then it only takes a few weeks for someone driving a transit to do the training required to sit the test for an HGV licence.
That doesn't solve today's problem though does it. It solves the problem X months down the line.
Or X weeks down the line.
Considering this so called problem has existed for six months, why have the employers moaning for six months been so utterly incapable of getting people through a six week training course?
There seems to be a bottleneck in testing. There could also be a bottleneck in training.
Like a lot of problems we are encountering which are related to Brexit there has been a massive failure to prepare for the change made.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
By people exactly who do you mean - the drivers or the companies who wish to employ the drivers?
So the govt is saying there will be pain now for a few months but thereafter the structural problems of the HGV driver industry will be healthier as we will have more home-grown drivers and need to rely less on foreigners. Hence not giving foreigners the right to come over here and drive our trucks.
So I suppose the bet is which will it be - the pain, such that it is, of a shortage of drivers for some time or the govt caves and allows temporary visas.
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Depends if you want fuel delivered or not. Hoyer have had drivers poached by "just pay more" offers. You can't give your drivers a pay rise and think job done. The next offer comes along and off they go. You need drivers today but they have gone. You can pay even more to bring some back but that is no good for today's deliveries. And then the cycle begins again.
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
If Hoyer have had their drivers poached then why haven't Hoyer paid more themselves? Hoyer are doing a specialist route that requires a specialist licence that should command a specialists pay rate on top.
That's like complaining that a brain surgeon has been poached by a GP Surgery. Why the heck would the hospital let the neurosurgeon walk out the door without beating the GPs offer?
One of the dirty little secrets about private medicine is that it allows high end medics to earn the money they might get while going abroad. While still working in the NHS.
So the NHS can pay lower rates.
But then finds that the said medics want to spend more and more time doing private practise.
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Depends if you want fuel delivered or not. Hoyer have had drivers poached by "just pay more" offers. You can't give your drivers a pay rise and think job done. The next offer comes along and off they go. You need drivers today but they have gone. You can pay even more to bring some back but that is no good for today's deliveries. And then the cycle begins again.
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
If Hoyer have had their drivers poached then why haven't Hoyer paid more themselves? Hoyer are doing a specialist route that requires a specialist licence that should command a specialists pay rate on top.
That's like complaining that a brain surgeon has been poached by a GP Surgery. Why the heck would the hospital let the neurosurgeon walk out the door without beating the GPs offer?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
The genuine market solution is to allow foreign drivers in to the country to fill the gaps we have. Your solution - artificially restrict supplies, create artificial shortages and raise prices to incentivise change - is the control economy one.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
Is the circle that free market, "libertarian" (LOL), invisible hand capitalists such as our Phil can't square.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
And if not, I guess other shortages of labour will present itself in due course as these drivers have to be coming from somewhere.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Good question. Would be interesting to see the stats. Last few Amazon deliveries I've had I would say 50% of them were in saloon cars. Which I'd not seen before.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
There's a "shortage of drivers" yet I can get four different drivers from different companies dropping off products at my front door in the same day.
Plenty of people in this country know how to drive and training to convert that to a HGV licence (if Testing bottlenecks are resolved) take weeks not years.
In an HGV or in a transit van?
You don't need an HGV licence to drive a transit and do the last mile delivery work for UPS / Hermes / Amazon / DPD..
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
A large proportion of people claiming UC (you can't generally claim JSA now) are unable to work full-time because of health or care commitments. Many UC claimants are of course working.
Also, I don't have the latest stats but I very much expect that the number of UC claimaints is indeed dropping dramatically at present.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Good question. Would be interesting to see the stats. Last few Amazon deliveries I've had I would say 50% of them were in saloon cars. Which I'd not seen before.
They will be doing them on the side for someone who is bona fide and keeping up the JSA/UC.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
There's a "shortage of drivers" yet I can get four different drivers from different companies dropping off products at my front door in the same day.
Plenty of people in this country know how to drive and training to convert that to a HGV licence (if Testing bottlenecks are resolved) take weeks not years.
In an HGV or in a transit van?
You don't need an HGV licence to drive a transit and do the last mile delivery work for UPS / Hermes / Amazon / DPD..
No, but if the person driving a transit is offered a really tempting salary then it only takes a few weeks for someone driving a transit to do the training required to sit the test for an HGV licence.
That doesn't solve today's problem though does it. It solves the problem X months down the line.
Or X weeks down the line.
Considering this so called problem has existed for six months, why have the employers moaning for six months been so utterly incapable of getting people through a six week training course?
There seems to be a bottleneck in testing. There could also be a bottleneck in training.
Like a lot of problems we are encountering which are related to Brexit there has been a massive failure to prepare for the change made.
There is a bottleneck in testing.
Driving tests can only be administered by qualified people.
The job is hard - with continual re-tests of the examiners - and guess what? The pay for examiners is/was low. A driving instructor told me that a lot of examiners for car tests were leaving to become instructors.
Try booking a car test before June next year. In London and the surrounding area, you can't.
Not wishing to prolong yesterdays discussion about the buy to let market in Darlington; but I did another rightmove search and found another house, 3 bed, EPC rating C for £52k.
It's a property for sale by auction, so no idea what it is worth. I'd call the guide price a knicker flash.
What is more it's modern method of auction (MMA), which is a big red flag. For a start there's a 6k fee on top, of which the Estate Agent is usually guaranteed half. Plus you are committing to signing a Reservation Agreement you have not seen yet, and after you have committed to the purchase and to pay your 6k.
The buyer is required to sign a reservation agreement and make payment of a non-refundable Reservation Fee. This being 4.2% of the purchase price including VAT, subject to a minimum of £6,000.00 including VAT. The Reservation Fee is paid in addition to purchase price and will be considered as part of the chargeable consideration for the property in the calculation for stamp duty liability. Buyers will be required to go through an identification verification process and provide proof of how the purchase would be funded.
This property has a Buyer Information Pack which is a collection of documents in relation to the property. The documents may not tell you everything you need to know about the property, so you are required to complete your own due diligence before bidding. A sample copy of the Reservation Agreement and terms and conditions are also contained within this pack. The buyer will also make payment of £300 including VAT towards the preparation cost of the pack, where it has been provided by iamsold.
The property is subject to an undisclosed Reserve Price with both the Reserve Price and Starting Bid being subject to change.
Sales on that street seem very variable, but there are a lot of 1 bed semis.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
So the govt is saying there will be pain now for a few months but thereafter the structural problems of the HGV driver industry will be healthier as we will have more home-grown drivers and need to rely less on foreigners. Hence not giving foreigners the right to come over here and drive our trucks.
So I suppose the bet is which will it be - the pain, such that it is, of a shortage of drivers for some time or the govt caves and allows temporary visas.
So perhaps we will be getting foreign drivers for Xmas? But just for Xmas not for life?
The skill is the 1% of the time: when you get to a depot and have to reverse into a narrow bay, or have to go down narrow lanes for a delivery. That takes skill and practice - and he says many existing drivers who just do depot-to-depot runs are pretty bad at this.
Good thing that's no longer on the test...
Isn't it? Even for lorry drivers? I'm surprised.
It is still on the test aiui, done at a third party facility to increase resources.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
And if not, I guess other shortages of labour will present itself in due course as these drivers have to be coming from somewhere.
Welcome to a whole heap of contradictions where people on UC will minimise the hours they work because there is zero incentive to work longer (see Philips comments about 75% tax).
Equally in some areas you really do need UC as without the contributions to housing costs people cannot afford to live in that area.
You may not like it but at the bottom of the wage scale various complications have made part time work the default option (and a lot of firms / sectors are so used to it they will never be able to resolve it)
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Good question. Would be interesting to see the stats. Last few Amazon deliveries I've had I would say 50% of them were in saloon cars. Which I'd not seen before.
They will be doing them on the side for someone who is bona fide and keeping up the JSA/UC.
Round my area of posho London, there are a couple of delivery outfits where a panel truck pulls up, and they break out the packages, in the street, to various car drivers for final delivery.
Given the timing and the vehicles involved, it looks like Ladies Who Lunch making some money after the school run. Had a package delivered by someone driving a Tesla Model X, the other day.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Good question. Would be interesting to see the stats. Last few Amazon deliveries I've had I would say 50% of them were in saloon cars. Which I'd not seen before.
There's certainly been an increase in "ordinary" people taking to driving delivery vans. I even spoke (only for 2-3 minutes mind, given their targets) to a couple of retired people who said they were enjoying it. They liked the independence, being out on the road, the pleasure people get from receiving their packages and the hours and shifts were more flexible than I'd thought.
However, I hear HGV working conditions are still horrific though - and few people really like a lorry driver - so it's probably a different kettle of fish once you go above 7.5t.
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Depends if you want fuel delivered or not. Hoyer have had drivers poached by "just pay more" offers. You can't give your drivers a pay rise and think job done. The next offer comes along and off they go. You need drivers today but they have gone. You can pay even more to bring some back but that is no good for today's deliveries. And then the cycle begins again.
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
If Hoyer have had their drivers poached then why haven't Hoyer paid more themselves? Hoyer are doing a specialist route that requires a specialist licence that should command a specialists pay rate on top.
That's like complaining that a brain surgeon has been poached by a GP Surgery. Why the heck would the hospital let the neurosurgeon walk out the door without beating the GPs offer?
A lot of people don't want more money they are very happy just earning X amount of money. Once standard HGV driving got to that wage level, no additional money is going to tempt them back.
This is a complex problem that just trying to pin it on one cause does not address how the matter is resolved
Wages are a very important part of the solution as we have relied for far too long on cheap European labour.
However, as has been said it is not a quick fix with drivers needing training and that takes time
If labour can be imported from outside the UK (and not just the EU) then that should be considered as should prioritising driver testing
I have heard it suggested the army can be brought in and that would help but I do not think there is a realistic solution in the short term and maybe we have to be prepared to see fewer service stations
And Brexit has played a part but notwithstanding @Scott_P incessant anti Brexit tweeting it is far from the only reason and we are out of the EU and none of the political parties are seeking to rejoin.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
And my license to drive anything up to 7.5 tons means I could go drive a 44 ton HGV tomorrow? Or a fuel tanker?
The reason why you are on here prattlng this nonsense, and nobody out there in the real world is implementing your very simple solutions is that there are straight out of the Muppet Show.
Not tomorrow, no.
But how long does it take to undertake the conversion training required? Years? Or weeks?
For the number of HGV drivers required it will be Years - because we only have a limited number of HGV trainers and they were already fully booked due to the delayed tests.
Slightly offtopic but Eek Twin A needs to start driving lessons again in Leeds. The instructor we've been recommended is fully booked to late November (and that's if everyone passes).
And that is another limitation that cannot be instantly fixed regardless of your ideas.
No it doesn't take years to train a driver, it takes weeks to do so.
If there's a bottleneck in the system and "throw money at it" is the solution then throw money at the bottleneck. As there's absolutely no reason whatsoever a weeks long training program should take years to complete.
Less Singapore on Thames, more Singapore Up Shit Creek
Yes, rubbish collections are being affected, and even talk of a three day week...
The concern is that bin lorry drivers are then gritter lorry drivers in the winter. Will government be funding the infinite pay rises needed to secure the services of council drivers?
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Depends if you want fuel delivered or not. Hoyer have had drivers poached by "just pay more" offers. You can't give your drivers a pay rise and think job done. The next offer comes along and off they go. You need drivers today but they have gone. You can pay even more to bring some back but that is no good for today's deliveries. And then the cycle begins again.
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
Probably repealing IR35, even temporarily, May entice some back into the labour market as many older drivers seem to have left over this change.
Conditions also seem to be poor for drivers in the U.K. compared to the continent.
I personally cycle to work and walk so I’m not bothered about fuel but why should my needs take precedence over the ability of the driver to maximise their income.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
As has been pointed out that is an administrative measure. Why don't you want to let the market sort it out?
Not wishing to prolong yesterdays discussion about the buy to let market in Darlington; but I did another rightmove search and found another house, 3 bed, EPC rating C for £52k.
It's a property for sale by auction, so no idea what it is worth. I'd call the guide price a knicker flash.
What is more it's modern method of auction (MMA), which is a big red flag. For a start there's a 6k fee on top, of which the Estate Agent is usually guaranteed half. Plus you are committing to signing a Reservation Agreement you have not seen yet, and after you have committed to the purchase and to pay your 6k.
The buyer is required to sign a reservation agreement and make payment of a non-refundable Reservation Fee. This being 4.2% of the purchase price including VAT, subject to a minimum of £6,000.00 including VAT. The Reservation Fee is paid in addition to purchase price and will be considered as part of the chargeable consideration for the property in the calculation for stamp duty liability. Buyers will be required to go through an identification verification process and provide proof of how the purchase would be funded.
This property has a Buyer Information Pack which is a collection of documents in relation to the property. The documents may not tell you everything you need to know about the property, so you are required to complete your own due diligence before bidding. A sample copy of the Reservation Agreement and terms and conditions are also contained within this pack. The buyer will also make payment of £300 including VAT towards the preparation cost of the pack, where it has been provided by iamsold.
The property is subject to an undisclosed Reserve Price with both the Reserve Price and Starting Bid being subject to change.
Sales on that street seem very variable, but there are a lot of 1 bed semis.
Thanks for that I missed it was a modern auction scam.
£52k will mean the minimum actual price is £60k + £6k for the scam artists fees.
As I said yesterday £60k is the base price for something in Darlington...
I did wonder why it hadn't sold immediately - at £52k I know 5 people who would have bought it instantly even if they had to deal with Ann Cordey herself..
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
So you would be enthusiastically backing the govt if it said that foreigners can come over here to drive trucks?
So the govt is saying there will be pain now for a few months but thereafter the structural problems of the HGV driver industry will be healthier as we will have more home-grown drivers and need to rely less on foreigners. Hence not giving foreigners the right to come over here and drive our trucks.
So I suppose the bet is which will it be - the pain, such that it is, of a shortage of drivers for some time or the govt caves and allows temporary visas.
It will be the former. Whilst a lot of noise is being made about this no-one normal is complaining about shortages, because there aren't any serious ones.
Also, we still have 400,000+ drivers of the 520,000 or so we should have - so roughly 80% of the time all deliveries can be made as planned.
What gives? Probably a few selected product lines, very early morning or late deliveries and stores with very high turnover in urban areas where they might have to wait an extra 90 minutes for the next shipment - thereby creating temporary gaps.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
You did not say Europe is half a million truckers short and I would rather listen to truckers who do the job to be honest
Why do you think there are no fuel shortages and empty shelves in the EU, Mr G?
I've experienced no fuel shortages or empty shelves here at all.
Wind still at 8.7gw this morning. As long as that keeps up the domestic pressure is going to come off the gas price. International pressures will remain and there will be some volatility but the particular combination of the interlink fire and a serious lack of wind were really providing the froth.
Having said that these companies that are going bust are a truly weird creation, simply parasitical on a very oddly constructed market. I would be delighted if we had a more diverse range of power suppliers but I really don't see the point of having a diverse range of bill providers. Their whole model is basically dependent upon playing the market, buying power that they do not generate to sell to customers through an infrastructure they do not own. If they manage to buy that power for less than they can sell it to customers they make a profit. If they don't, as now, they make a loss. But where is the societal gain from all of this? Why is this better than simply regulating the prices that those who do generate the energy are allowed to charge?
We have something very similar in the water industry. Companies that do not own or maintain infrastructure or provide water charge commercial clients (in Scotland at least they are restricted to commercial clients) for that water. What, other than their own costs and profit, do they bring to the party?
Well, I went with Iresa for a while; an energy provider seemingly run from a shed in Nottingham by one man. They had the cheapest prices possible and made no claims to have any environmental credentials at all. I went down this road because we were short of money and my wife was pregnant. I paid for a fraction of the energy that I actually used. I tried to put in meter readings, but they were never accepted. You could not call them and they never replied to any emails or written correspondence. Eventually they went bust. The new provider could not believe me when I gave the meter reading, at which point I offered to pay the arrears. They thanked me profusely for my honesty - the implication was that I could have got away with not paying for all the energy provided by Iresa because no one had any idea at all about our meter reading or records of what energy they had actually provided us with.
What purpose do they perform? It is a good question. It is a deranged free market experiment driven by blind faith; something which I have a profound objection to, but a system that you can game if you are clever enough. However, I will concede that the existence of entities like Iresa probably effected a downward pressure on prices and generated efficiencies in larger entities which would not otherwise occur.
To counter that with a tale of Japanese efficiency, I have a workshop building next to my house that's on its own power line. It had old-fashioned-looking meter on it from many years ago, but when I moved in they added a fancy new meter and connected all the cables to that, while leaving the old one there hanging from a piece of string. The new meter automatically sends data to the electricity company, but the old meter can't send any data since no power is conducted to it through the string, so every month a lady from the electricity company dutifully trundles up on her moped and takes a reading to prove that it hasn't consumed some electricity somehow.
Remember how "controlled immigration" was definitely not cover for a ban on immigration? This is a clear test. Supposedly a controlled migration scheme means we only recruit the people we need.
We clearly need, yet there is a refusal to allow migration. So either we use our new points based system to hire the people we need, or we have a policy to not let people in at all.
We really are heading into an autumn of shit. Rhetoric always goes splat against reality, and we've been fed a right load of old guff by the man who wrote his speech to the UN on the train ride to the UN and decided to quote Kermit the Frog and criticise his mistreatment of Miss Piggy.
I was assured yesterday that there would be an easy market solution to the driver shortage. "Just pay more" and the good firms win and the scrooge firms die and huzzah for that! The fuel crisis is direct proof of this theory being as good as something the clown threw together on the train. Hoyer have a shortage of drivers. Their HGV special load licensed drivers - the people who can drive fuel trucks - have been poached.
We can't quickly train people to drive fuel tankers. So the very specialised pool of not enough drivers will have to be brought back. "Just pay more". The problem is that you can pay more. Then someone offers even more and off they go, you are short of drivers and the fuel runs out.
A wild west gunfight between firms where you do not know one day to the next if your drivers will turn up works for no-one. During the pay war you both pay a lot more *and* have driver shortages. And at the end all the firms have vastly inflated pay bills and the same lack of drivers they started with.
UC. Food. Fuel. Energy Costs. Pox rates still stubbornly massive in international terms. Perhaps Beaker will start to blame Kermit the Frog for these absolute failures. They were warned what would happen - directly on energy prices. Chose to ignore the experts and here we are.
How do you employ other people then? Drivers aren't the only specialised people on the planet. I expect there's a shortage of Rochdale Pioneers. Why don't we just import a lot of people to drive down your salary?
In the long term we will not have a shortage. We will invest into facilities for trucks and their drivers - both at the roadside and at customer sites - so that conditions are improved as pay has been. In a few years we shouldn't have the acute shortage we have now.
But here and now? We are fucked. There are not enough drivers, we can't train enough drivers quickly even if a bucket of cash was thrown at it, and we're entering the busiest season of the year.
So the solution is simple. 1. Lift the ban on cabotage 2. A 3 month work visa for drivers 3. A ban on predatory "just pay more" offers
That gets us through Christmas. Remember that the fuel crisis is because Hoyer have had their ADR drivers poached by "just pay more". Even if Hoyer now turn round and pay even more there is a gap until replacements are recruited, and there is nothing to stop another firm paying even more to poach again.
Why should just pay more offers be banned for lorry drivers ? Why shouldn’t they make hay while the sun shines ?
Depends if you want fuel delivered or not. Hoyer have had drivers poached by "just pay more" offers. You can't give your drivers a pay rise and think job done. The next offer comes along and off they go. You need drivers today but they have gone. You can pay even more to bring some back but that is no good for today's deliveries. And then the cycle begins again.
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
Probably repealing IR35, even temporarily, May entice some back into the labour market as many older drivers seem to have left over this change.
Conditions also seem to be poor for drivers in the U.K. compared to the continent.
I personally cycle to work and walk so I’m not bothered about fuel but why should my needs take precedence over the ability of the driver to maximise their income.
Repealing IR35 is never going to happen - and it shouldn't do because I'm sorry but unless you actually own / lease and insure the cab you were always inside IR35.
Put it this way given the choice of repealing IR35 and the UK providing open labour access to Europeans, the latter is way more likely.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
5 live this morning had truckers phoning in complaining about the medias attempt to blame Brexit and reiterating the comments you make
Furthermore a trucker phoned in who works in Europe who said there are half a million drivers short in Europe and the idea the UK could just get drivers from Europe is unrealistic
It was very interesting to hear from trucker themselves
We did this yesterday. If you are an EU driver you can work anywhere in the EU. The shortages in one country get covered by drivers from another country. "Just pay more" works here because there is a vast labour pool.
If the UK offered a 3 month work visa and a shit ton of cash, we absolutely will get drivers come over. Because the fortune on offer here to your Latvian truck driver demolishes what is on offer elsewhere.
"Just pay more" doesn't work in the GB because we have a small labour pool which is fixed. All we can do is poach drivers from one firm to another and back again without actually fixing the issue.
The labour pool is about 50 million people in this country.
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
So your solution is to suffer the shortages until enough people can be persuaded to train as HGV drivers when the alternative is to train HGV drivers and also solve the problems we have now immediately. And you say others lack imagination!!
If we "solve the problems immediately" then what reason would anyone have to invest in training?
If the only incentive you can think of to encourage investment in training is to deprive people of fuel and choice, then you have very little imagination.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
So why command and control immigration?
I support liberal immigration and people can get a visa so long as they're on a high wage.
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
Tbh Philip, I rate most of what you post on here and although our political views differ markedly, I generally enjoy the challenge your well-argued points deliver to my world view. It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. However, you're flogging a dead horse on this one.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
I have a question. Anyone who is claiming JSA/UC and has a driving license should be able to do a delivery job. Shouldn’t the numbers on JSA/UC be dropping dramatically?
Good question. Would be interesting to see the stats. Last few Amazon deliveries I've had I would say 50% of them were in saloon cars. Which I'd not seen before.
They will be doing them on the side for someone who is bona fide and keeping up the JSA/UC.
Round my area of posho London, there are a couple of delivery outfits where a panel truck pulls up, and they break out the packages, in the street, to various car drivers for final delivery.
Given the timing and the vehicles involved, it looks like Ladies Who Lunch making some money after the school run. Had a package delivered by someone driving a Tesla Model X, the other day.
For sure there will be some see a way to make good money , they have their own company working for the courier companies and they can use casual labour to do the deliveries and make some cash. Sure to be happening. You need to do a lot of deliveries to make money given most pay well under £2 a time and you have to provide the transport , fuel , etc.
The skill is the 1% of the time: when you get to a depot and have to reverse into a narrow bay, or have to go down narrow lanes for a delivery. That takes skill and practice - and he says many existing drivers who just do depot-to-depot runs are pretty bad at this.
Good thing that's no longer on the test...
Isn't it? Even for lorry drivers? I'm surprised.
It is still on the test aiui, done at a third party facility to increase resources.
The latest wheeze will be to allow part qualified HGV drivers out with a truck before they have completed the reversal part. Perhaps next will be to abolish the ADR tests as well. Surely it is preferable to have a plucky Brit with 6 hours experience driving 44 tons of unleaded around rather than the shame in having some qualified foreigner do it?
Less Singapore on Thames, more Singapore Up Shit Creek
Yes, rubbish collections are being affected, and even talk of a three day week...
The concern is that bin lorry drivers are then gritter lorry drivers in the winter. Will government be funding the infinite pay rises needed to secure the services of council drivers?
Many of these work in the private sector. The Guardian ran an article in the week on it. Serco were paying around 12 quid an hour and their comment was ‘it’s not just about the money’ and bin collections are being missed in parts of the country already.
Brexit is working, its the only gamebin town. Driver shortages, container shortages etc are everywhere.
Driver shortages and container shortages aren't the same as food and petrol shortages, however. I haven't seen any reports of these in northern continental Europe up to now, which is what the Daily Mail constituency are beginning to notice also.
Disruptions in supply may well vary but a shortage of drivers makes such disruptions inevitable and that seems pretty universal in Europe at the moment.
There was a professional driver on R5 when I was driving home a couple of days ago who described how drivers had been treated as third class citizens, made to wait hours for both loads to be put on or taken off with no provision for them in terms of places to go and a pretty basic wage for a lonely, boring job. He admitted that he had just had a wage increase and that the supermarkets were now much keener to get them in and out. I am sure the likes of Tesco will want all its drivers on the road again as fast as possible at the moment.
There are certainly multiple well-known problems with the industry that have been widely reported, but until or unless people see plain evidence that the problems are as bad in neighbouring countries - which they haven't, and neither have I, frankly - Brexit will feature heavily.
I agree and made a similar point yesterday.
In America people are facing the same issues but they just pay whatever escalated prices are needed and get on with it. Inflation is running higher there, but the invisible hand is doing its job.
In the UK rather than 'Keep Calm And Carry On' we have 'whinge incessantly about Brexit'.
If you want to moan and moan then that's fine, you have free speech. But it won't get much done, not like gritting your teeth and actually paying your drivers or for timber or whatever the price the market demands.
I suggest that the issue is not necessarily Brexit itself, bit the apparent assumption in Government and Leavers generally, that 'we'll just Leave and all will be well'.
Very little thought was given to anything other than the obvious, and in many cases that was bodged.
All is well.
Its not the Government's job to fix companies supply chains, that's their own job. If something needs to change, they need to change it, and the market will ensure they do.
Thought boss of Tesco had said they had done everything in their power and shortages were still inevitable.
Time to grant visas for lorry drivers methinks. The Government won't survive long if most petrol stations are shut.
The boss of Tesco has a vested interest in not paying more.
He should stop moaning and pay what is required. But leftwingers would rather blame Brexit than see people get a pay rise.
You have a vested interest in denying reality. Drivers have had a huuuuge increase. All drivers. Every firm. The "boss of Tesco" is paying a lot more. And still has a shortage of drivers. Because there's a shortage of drivers.
There's a "shortage of drivers" yet I can get four different drivers from different companies dropping off products at my front door in the same day.
Plenty of people in this country know how to drive and training to convert that to a HGV licence (if Testing bottlenecks are resolved) take weeks not years.
Not wishing to prolong yesterdays discussion about the buy to let market in Darlington; but I did another rightmove search and found another house, 3 bed, EPC rating C for £52k.
It's a property for sale by auction, so no idea what it is worth. I'd call the guide price a knicker flash.
What is more it's modern method of auction (MMA), which is a big red flag. For a start there's a 6k fee on top, of which the Estate Agent is usually guaranteed half. Plus you are committing to signing a Reservation Agreement you have not seen yet, and after you have committed to the purchase and to pay your 6k.
The buyer is required to sign a reservation agreement and make payment of a non-refundable Reservation Fee. This being 4.2% of the purchase price including VAT, subject to a minimum of £6,000.00 including VAT. The Reservation Fee is paid in addition to purchase price and will be considered as part of the chargeable consideration for the property in the calculation for stamp duty liability. Buyers will be required to go through an identification verification process and provide proof of how the purchase would be funded.
This property has a Buyer Information Pack which is a collection of documents in relation to the property. The documents may not tell you everything you need to know about the property, so you are required to complete your own due diligence before bidding. A sample copy of the Reservation Agreement and terms and conditions are also contained within this pack. The buyer will also make payment of £300 including VAT towards the preparation cost of the pack, where it has been provided by iamsold.
The property is subject to an undisclosed Reserve Price with both the Reserve Price and Starting Bid being subject to change.
Sales on that street seem very variable, but there are a lot of 1 bed semis.
I am sitting in a hotel waiting to do my Qured pre-departure test online.
After yesterday’s experience of trying to complete the government PLF on a website that seemed slow and overloaded and which refused to register my vaccination from the NHS’s own Q symbol, let’s hope this goes well
Comments
How many people will go and do what I've thought of doing and filling up today? (I'm not going to... got enough... but going to have to plan journeys better for a while I reckon).
Today will be a shit storm at the forecourts.....
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/c137f63a-1c80-11ec-8d6d-67649e90fafa?shareToken=f3d0ca89acd77865fcbd859d0ec700bd https://twitter.com/Simon_Nixon/status/1441296805111554053/photo/1
You don't need an HGV licence to drive a transit and do the last mile delivery work for UPS / Hermes / Amazon / DPD..
Woman behind counter says they will be shut before lunch as levels were low and not expecting a delivery till Sunday at the earliest.
Crisis what crisis?
Labour lead by Tuesday?
32.7 million people (2019) have a full driver's licence.
If poaching people is all we can do you have a very small imagination.
Imagine you are currently in a job. Or you are retired. I can imagine some people seeing headlines about the pay bonanza for truckers and making post haste for the nearest training centre, but not many.
A free free market is brilliant at allocating resources that are interchangeable and mobile. The stickier and harder to create the resources are, the more likely it is to get stuck in some horrible intermediate state.
On #BBCBreakfast Transport Secretary Grants Shapps says he would relax rules on EU drivers working in the UK, if it helped solved the issue of driver shortages.
https://bbc.in/3i22xsy https://twitter.com/BBCBreakfast/status/1441296823558148098/video/1
My uncle-in-law is a retired ex-Hoyer driver. He used to like the freedom that came with driving fuel tankers around. But others didn't. And disappointingly for Philip (a) he isn't interested in coming back at any price and (b) his license is expired and it takes ages to get certified to drive fuel around. So "just pay more" and "just train more" remains a long term fix for an immediate term problem.
Maybe listen to it on BBC sounds then you can contribute from a position of knowledge
NI up £3 a week throw toys out of pram.
No petrol shrugs shoulders.
Strange individual
We are no longer in the EU, we can do what we like, so suspend ADR and allow any HGV driver with an appropriate weight licence to drive tankers.
Issue resolved and a demonstrable Brexit bonus, what could possibly go wrong?
Edit...except a mini Buncefield event in a town near you.
The reason why you are on here prattlng this nonsense, and nobody out there in the real world is implementing your very simple solutions is that there are straight out of the Muppet Show.
But how long does it take to undertake the conversion training required? Years? Or weeks?
Remember that many truck drivers are on very loose contracts. Ordinary rules about notice do not apply for so many of them. And the market is white hot for new gigs so the canny ones are chasing the money. I don't blame them for that but it does create big problems.
Unless we are willing to fill the holes in the labour market we need to ensure that essentials are covered. We need bin lorry drivers to not go and drive for Amazon. We need fuel tanker drivers to deliver fuel not sofas.
Further, some workers were legally tied to their place of work - not just serfs... IIRC it was the 18th cent before the Scottish practise of making miners legally bound to their place of employment ended.
Pay whatever the market demands. If a trucker ends up on 60k or 100k or more, then that's the market rate.
But you want to ban "predatory" pay rises as the solution? 😂
Talk about the zeal of the convert...
I wouldn’t want to give up a potential long-term career in law for a short term significant pay increase driving vans/lorries.
My girlfriend briefly considered it (she works for the NHS) before she decided she didn’t want to be away from home for long periods of time.
Large lorries (> 7.5 tonnes) are actually quit easy to drive, 99% of the time - especially long distance. He says that one problem is keeping your wits during the boredom of long motorway journeys. Especially if they're automatics (most large trucks are). Once you've got used to braking distances with and without loads, it's easy. Also, knowing where your corners are is important.
The skill is the 1% of the time: when you get to a depot and have to reverse into a narrow bay, or have to go down narrow lanes for a delivery. That takes skill and practice - and he says many existing drivers who just do depot-to-depot runs are pretty bad at this.
Considering this so called problem has existed for six months, why have the employers moaning for six months been so utterly incapable of getting people through a six week training course?
Slightly offtopic but Eek Twin A needs to start driving lessons again in Leeds. The instructor we've been recommended is fully booked to late November (and that's if everyone passes).
And that is another limitation that cannot be instantly fixed regardless of your ideas.
First up - a property & education qualification to vote.
Second up - maximum wages legislated for all non-degree'd jobs.
Mr. Malmesbury, I remember reading of minimum wages in the 14th century but maximum ones in the 17th.
That's like complaining that a brain surgeon has been poached by a GP Surgery. Why the heck would the hospital let the neurosurgeon walk out the door without beating the GPs offer?
@Simon_Nixon @thetimes
https://youtu.be/E9Hz_6QV3eY
Less Singapore on Thames, more Singapore Up Shit Creek
You are on a poor run of form Phil
Command and control economies don't work. Let the market do its job with its invisible hand. People will invest in training if they have no alternative.
This was usual combined with legally mandated prices for various things. And not just staples. There were attempts to set maximum prices for luxuries such as fine wines. and even attempts to legislate what you could wear (by social class).
They all worked about as well as might be expected.
The central idea behind all of this was an attempt to impose stasis on society. To many in the medieval world (and into the Tudor world), the idea of growth and change was bad. It meant a change in The Order Of Things. The ideal society was unchanging....
Like a lot of problems we are encountering which are related to Brexit there has been a massive failure to prepare for the change made.
So I suppose the bet is which will it be - the pain, such that it is, of a shortage of drivers for some time or the govt caves and allows temporary visas.
So the NHS can pay lower rates.
But then finds that the said medics want to spend more and more time doing private practise.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/24/keir-starmer-centrists-leader-essay-party-modernise
Also, I don't have the latest stats but I very much expect that the number of UC claimaints is indeed dropping dramatically at present.
Driving tests can only be administered by qualified people.
The job is hard - with continual re-tests of the examiners - and guess what? The pay for examiners is/was low. A driving instructor told me that a lot of examiners for car tests were leaving to become instructors.
Try booking a car test before June next year. In London and the surrounding area, you can't.
What is more it's modern method of auction (MMA), which is a big red flag. For a start there's a 6k fee on top, of which the Estate Agent is usually guaranteed half. Plus you are committing to signing a Reservation Agreement you have not seen yet, and after you have committed to the purchase and to pay your 6k.
The buyer is required to sign a reservation agreement and make payment of a non-refundable Reservation Fee. This being 4.2% of the purchase price including VAT, subject to a minimum of £6,000.00 including VAT. The Reservation Fee is paid in addition to purchase price and will be considered as part of the chargeable consideration for the property in the calculation for stamp duty liability. Buyers will be required to go through an identification verification process and provide proof of how the purchase would be funded.
This property has a Buyer Information Pack which is a collection of documents in relation to the property. The documents may not tell you everything you need to know about the property, so you are required to complete your own due diligence before bidding. A sample copy of the Reservation Agreement and terms and conditions are also contained within this pack. The buyer will also make payment of £300 including VAT towards the preparation cost of the pack, where it has been provided by iamsold.
The property is subject to an undisclosed Reserve Price with both the Reserve Price and Starting Bid being subject to change.
Sales on that street seem very variable, but there are a lot of 1 bed semis.
This will sell for perhaps 60-75k. Plus £6000.
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices/dl1/louisa-street.html?country=england&referrer=landingPage&searchLocation=Louisa+Street
It's low wage open immigration that has ended. No new limits have been put on high wage immigration.
PB Tories learning about the lump of labour fallacy in real time.
Equally in some areas you really do need UC as without the contributions to housing costs people cannot afford to live in that area.
You may not like it but at the bottom of the wage scale various complications have made part time work the default option (and a lot of firms / sectors are so used to it they will never be able to resolve it)
Given the timing and the vehicles involved, it looks like Ladies Who Lunch making some money after the school run. Had a package delivered by someone driving a Tesla Model X, the other day.
However, I hear HGV working conditions are still horrific though - and few people really like a lorry driver - so it's probably a different kettle of fish once you go above 7.5t.
Wages are a very important part of the solution as we have relied for far too long on cheap European labour.
However, as has been said it is not a quick fix with drivers needing training and that takes time
If labour can be imported from outside the UK (and not just the EU) then that should be considered as should prioritising driver testing
I have heard it suggested the army can be brought in and that would help but I do not think there is a realistic solution in the short term and maybe we have to be prepared to see fewer service stations
And Brexit has played a part but notwithstanding @Scott_P incessant anti Brexit tweeting it is far from the only reason and we are out of the EU and none of the political parties are seeking to rejoin.
If there's a bottleneck in the system and "throw money at it" is the solution then throw money at the bottleneck. As there's absolutely no reason whatsoever a weeks long training program should take years to complete.
Conditions also seem to be poor for drivers in the U.K. compared to the continent.
I personally cycle to work and walk so I’m not bothered about fuel but why should my needs take precedence over the ability of the driver to maximise their income.
£52k will mean the minimum actual price is £60k + £6k for the scam artists fees.
As I said yesterday £60k is the base price for something in Darlington...
I did wonder why it hadn't sold immediately - at £52k I know 5 people who would have bought it instantly even if they had to deal with Ann Cordey herself..
Also, we still have 400,000+ drivers of the 520,000 or so we should have - so roughly 80% of the time all deliveries can be made as planned.
What gives? Probably a few selected product lines, very early morning or late deliveries and stores with very high turnover in urban areas where they might have to wait an extra 90 minutes for the next shipment - thereby creating temporary gaps.
We clearly need, yet there is a refusal to allow migration. So either we use our new points based system to hire the people we need, or we have a policy to not let people in at all.
Put it this way given the choice of repealing IR35 and the UK providing open labour access to Europeans, the latter is way more likely.
To answer your specific point: 'It's low wage open immigration that has ended' - it's the ending of low wage open immigration that's causing the current crisis.
To convert.
After yesterday’s experience of trying to complete the government PLF on a website that seemed slow and overloaded and which refused to register my vaccination from the NHS’s own Q symbol, let’s hope this goes well