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.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
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.
As I said yesterday I had my Asda order agian delivered in full and Asda seems well stocked
A notice circulated yesterday that all the main supermarket stations were open for fuel
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.
If it is for more than pin money you need to do a lot of hours to make a living delivering parcels. They are up early to go load vans and then driving till well into evening , plus they have to fund their own transport etc. If you are a breadwinner it is a tough gig.
Tests will also be made shorter by removing the ‘reversing exercise’ element – and for vehicles with trailers, the ‘uncoupling and recoupling’ exercise
...but reversing accidents are the ones that kill old ladies who cross behind the truck. Now is it a justifiable defence for a driver facing a death by careless driving charge to claim "no one trained me to look out for old ladies crossing blind behind me"? I work in an industry where we kill more people than any other, primarily through vehicle and pedestrian conflicts. This is nonsense!
I'm sorry, but my greatest fears for the unravelling of genuinely sensible health and safety legislation and regulation, post Brexit are coming true.
On occasions, safety rules are not just red tape they have a purpose.
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 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.
Yup. This would be over very short distances. Literally a mile or 2.
Even so, it can't be more than pin money.
I think there are some who are doing it on foot, with a trolley thing. I'm pretty sure someone mentioned that the other day, locally.
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.
It is all down to incompetent useless Tory Hooray Henry's and their xenophobic voters.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
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.
Some bottlenecks can't be fixed by throwing money at it - it requires time...
Again, let my go back to the reason why the Budget is now in October rather than March.
Software developers (including those at HMRC) need time to update the software to reflect the changes being announced. They can't do it instantly regardless of the money you offer them.
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?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
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.
I don’t disagree with you on IR35 at all. It is a tax dodgers charter. But it is a suggestion to get around the issue.
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.
Were delivery vans previously driven only by extraordinary people? I have fond recollections of the only time I've ever ridden in an HGV cab, when my (now) wife and I hitch-hiked to Dublin from Cambridge. The driver was a top bloke, really funny. My abiding memory was his visceral hatred of coach drivers. The cab was pretty comfy but I'd say it was a lonely job judging by how chatty he was.
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.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
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.
As I said yesterday I had my Asda order agian delivered in full and Asda seems well stocked
A notice circulated yesterday that all the main supermarket stations were open for fuel
Full delivery from Sainsbury's yesterday except water bottles, of which my wife's regular brand was replaced with one I had never heard of. Still, water is water.
Chatted to the driver about shortages and he said it was all 'bollx' and no sign of it that he can see. He claimed it was all being made up by the media.
This week's Polling Station video from bookmaker Star Sports discusses Germany and Labour with guest Patrick English of Yougov/Exeter/LSE. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADPovZ7DWGw
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?
Fantastic idea!
But not behind me or my loved ones thank you very much!
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
"We have become a grandmother."
Except Maggie had been PM for a decade when she used the Royal We.
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.
How much does it cost?
To convert.
No way you can drive those monster trucks after a few weeks either , he is absolutely barking.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
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.
All EU countries are experiencing shortages. Sure, ours is a bit more pronounced as our market adjusts but it will.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
That is quite a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
I think everyone knows that it is limited as you say, no one is unable to buy food only because of shortages or unable to fill up their car. So it is at minor nuisance level for those not involved in the impacted industries.
But if the press and those industries had not been complaining loudly do you really think the government would have bothered doing anything at all? At least we have finally started to increase the number of tests we offer.
Without the "political" agenda, the situation would get worse and worse, highlighting problems so they can be addressed is common sense imo not political.
Tests will also be made shorter by removing the ‘reversing exercise’ element – and for vehicles with trailers, the ‘uncoupling and recoupling’ exercise
...but reversing accidents are the ones that kill old ladies who cross behind the truck. Now is it a justifiable defence for a driver facing a death by careless driving charge to claim "no one trained me to look out for old ladies crossing blind behind me"? I work in an industry where we kill more people than any other, primarily through vehicle and pedestrian conflicts. This is nonsense!
I'm sorry, but my greatest fears for the unravelling of genuinely sensible health and safety legislation and regulation, post Brexit are coming true.
On occasions, safety rules are not just red tape they have a purpose.
This is Scott. It hasn't been removed. FBPE : Full-on Bullshitters Pro-EU. Pity there isn't an L in FBPE.
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.
As I said yesterday I had my Asda order agian delivered in full and Asda seems well stocked
A notice circulated yesterday that all the main supermarket stations were open for fuel
Full delivery from Sainsbury's yesterday except water bottles, of which my wife's regular brand was replaced with one I had never heard of. Still, water is water.
Chatted to the driver about shortages and he said it was all 'bollx' and no sign of it that he can see. He claimed it was all being made up by the media.
See my post below. Man looks at his local store, doesn't see a problem so everything is fine with the world.
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.
I’m all for controlled immigration and calling in the skills we need and, you’re right, this is clearly a case of it. I don’t understand the reticence either.
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?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
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.
Should be checking if any of the 1000 a day landing in Kent can drive HGV's, fastrack their applications.
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.
If it is for more than pin money you need to do a lot of hours to make a living delivering parcels. They are up early to go load vans and then driving till well into evening , plus they have to fund their own transport etc. If you are a breadwinner it is a tough gig.
Yes, I don't doubt that's true if it's your main job. These were retired people though (in their 60s) doing it 2-3 days a week to get them out of the house and earn a bit extra though.
HGV driving is hard. You work very long hours, a long way from your family most of the week, and drive boring routes all day and then sleep in a lay-by. Often you don't even have time to stop for a pee. And, everyone else on the road hates you and is rude to you.
Tests will also be made shorter by removing the ‘reversing exercise’ element – and for vehicles with trailers, the ‘uncoupling and recoupling’ exercise
...but reversing accidents are the ones that kill old ladies who cross behind the truck. Now is it a justifiable defence for a driver facing a death by careless driving charge to claim "no one trained me to look out for old ladies crossing blind behind me"? I work in an industry where we kill more people than any other, primarily through vehicle and pedestrian conflicts. This is nonsense!
I'm sorry, but my greatest fears for the unravelling of genuinely sensible health and safety legislation and regulation, post Brexit are coming true.
On occasions, safety rules are not just red tape they have a purpose.
This is Scott. It hasn't been removed. FBPE : Full-on Bullshitters Pro-EU. Pity there isn't an L in FBPE.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
Yep, that section struck me at the time, more for the lack of self awareness that it applied precisely to the life and works of one Boris Johnson than anything else. Unless it was genius level self satire of 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.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
We went into Waitrose Gillingham yesterday - definitely gaps on the shelves, albeit of things that only we Waitrose shoppers would consider essential 😉 (e.g. no fresh dill - OMG!)
One of the floor managers who works there said supply is getting noticeably worse, she's expecting Christmas to be a nightmare. Time will tell.
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?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
It's obvious where this will end up - loads of exemptions, special visa schemes, temporary quotas etc to allow an influx of EU labour to plug the gaps. Business will demand it. In the end we will have semi-free movement of labour, but only in one direction, and with extra costs and uncertainties for business. In other words, the worst of all worlds.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
That is quite a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing.
Actually his speech was quite entertaining and well received
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.
All EU countries are experiencing shortages. Sure, ours is a bit more pronounced as our market adjusts but it will.
Ours is rather more acute if the overall European shortfall is estimated at 500,000 and our share is estimated north of 100,000, and that's before we get to the self inflicted wound
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 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)
Philip is right about the 75% taper point.
I wonder if the Govt will reverse ferret on this?
They should at least go back to the IDS intension for UC - restore the 10% of cuts by cash terms freeze since 2015, and put the taper at around 50%.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The fact your wife gets what she wants in the delicatessen a couple of times a week is hardly evidence that all is well
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
Yep, that section struck me at the time, more for the lack of self awareness that it applied precisely to the life and works of one Boris Johnson than anything else. Unless it was genius level self satire of 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.
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?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
I have no problem with high pay but again are you certain there are sufficient truckers in Europe with their own half million shortfall
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
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.
I don’t disagree with you on IR35 at all. It is a tax dodgers charter. But it is a suggestion to get around the issue.
My response is based on my detailed knowledge of the issue. HMRC are loving the new rules, shall we just say a lot of HR departments are currently scared witless by them because HMRC are paying close attention and ensuring they are met.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
That is quite a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing.
Actually his speech was quite entertaining and well received
‘We go live to Big_G Towers in North Wales for a reaction..’
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.
We bought our current house at auction (not in Darlington tbf). The guide price bore little relationship to the price we ended up paying, sadly ☹️
Yep - auctions are game where you can do really badly or really well.
If you want a shop, my great-grandfather's shop - equipped for hairdressing plus a flat - is coming up in the next few months. Guide price will be about 40k .
Mum unfortunately popped her clogs 3 days before it was coming up in Nov 2019, and it has been stuck in the estate - empty - ever since.
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.
If it is for more than pin money you need to do a lot of hours to make a living delivering parcels. They are up early to go load vans and then driving till well into evening , plus they have to fund their own transport etc. If you are a breadwinner it is a tough gig.
Is that vans in livery?
If not, there's a fantastic competitive advantage there for electric power.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
Apart from one Saturday where my local Sainsbury’s had no rice, pasta and the frozen aisles were empty I’ve experienced no shortages at all either at Sainsbury’s or my local Tesco or my local costcutter.
I see often, usually FBPE type remainers, going on about shortages and posting pictures of them yet my reality is this is not the case.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The fact your wife gets what she wants in the delicatessen a couple of times a week is hardly evidence that all is well
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
I think everyone knows that it is limited as you say, no one is unable to buy food only because of shortages or unable to fill up their car. So it is at minor nuisance level for those not involved in the impacted industries.
But if the press and those industries had not been complaining loudly do you really think the government would have bothered doing anything at all? At least we have finally started to increase the number of tests we offer.
Without the "political" agenda, the situation would get worse and worse, highlighting problems so they can be addressed is common sense imo not political.
That feels about right - it's the rough and ready way that democracies work, by budding problems being highlighted by screaming headlines and noisy pressure groups and special interests. It's erratic and vulgar and unpredictanle but it mostly sort of works. The main problem is that some groups don't get the treatment at all and just suffer in silence.
The HGV driver shortage is real, and it's likely to cause modferately severe problems at times. The impact of higher fuel prices is probably more serious in the medium term.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
That is quite a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing.
Actually his speech was quite entertaining and well received
Indeed it is entertaining that he can publicly and directly call out his own character flaws that make him unfit for office and his fan club still do not care or perhaps notice. Sad but yes, entertaining.
Tests will also be made shorter by removing the ‘reversing exercise’ element – and for vehicles with trailers, the ‘uncoupling and recoupling’ exercise
...but reversing accidents are the ones that kill old ladies who cross behind the truck. Now is it a justifiable defence for a driver facing a death by careless driving charge to claim "no one trained me to look out for old ladies crossing blind behind me"? I work in an industry where we kill more people than any other, primarily through vehicle and pedestrian conflicts. This is nonsense!
I'm sorry, but my greatest fears for the unravelling of genuinely sensible health and safety legislation and regulation, post Brexit are coming true.
On occasions, safety rules are not just red tape they have a purpose.
This is Scott. It hasn't been removed. FBPE : Full-on Bullshitters Pro-EU. Pity there isn't an L in FBPE.
Knowing what "authorised third party testers" can look like, Scott's point still stands. Who is the authorised third party tester in this case anyway? I suspect it could be the "Operator" (the Transport Manager in most cases). "Show me how you reverse ... yeah, that's fine, off you go".
This is all occuring on Johnson's watch, whether it is his direct fault or not, he bends over and takes the caning, but a handful of posters on here are wringing their hands "ooh, it not the fault of Brexit, it's not the fault of Boris", s*** happens"
The thing to do is get in before the panic buyers….
I am still in the EU (where there is abundant fuel), heading for Belgium in the hope of turning my dog into a Belgian pet. I guess it makes sense to fill up before I set off for home tomorrow?
Do I need to fill the car with emergency relief supplies?
Can you bring me back a couple of tins of pilchards in tomato sauce? And some lucozade revive, lemon flavour please.
Do they have the 440ml cans of original coke over there?
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.
Were delivery vans previously driven only by extraordinary people? I have fond recollections of the only time I've ever ridden in an HGV cab, when my (now) wife and I hitch-hiked to Dublin from Cambridge. The driver was a top bloke, really funny. My abiding memory was his visceral hatred of coach drivers. The cab was pretty comfy but I'd say it was a lonely job judging by how chatty he was.
You woudn't think it's an ideal job for the gregarious type.
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 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.
If it is for more than pin money you need to do a lot of hours to make a living delivering parcels. They are up early to go load vans and then driving till well into evening , plus they have to fund their own transport etc. If you are a breadwinner it is a tough gig.
Is that vans in livery?
If not, there's a fantastic competitive advantage there for electric power.
Only a few have livery , eg UPS, DPD, majority are just guys in white vans or even cars working for the various courier companies on a parcel by parcel basis. You can make money but need to work your butt off as I believe it is well under £2 a time. Imagine they hope for lots of parcels in small area to help get decent ratio. But guys who deliver here have been to a depot at crack of dawn and then driven 30/40 miles before start off.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
Apart from one Saturday where my local Sainsbury’s had no rice, pasta and the frozen aisles were empty I’ve experienced no shortages at all either at Sainsbury’s or my local Tesco or my local costcutter.
I see often, usually FBPE type remainers, going on about shortages and posting pictures of them yet my reality is this is not the case.
So part from that time you saw empty aisles, there are no empty aisles.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
That is quite a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing.
Actually his speech was quite entertaining and well received
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.
It is all down to incompetent useless Tory Hooray Henry's and their xenophobic voters.
Yes. The lights are out and the Range Rover has run out of fuel in a layby fifty miles from home, but ha, we gave French a bloody nose last week!
Harry Lambert's recent NS article giving 10 big historic reasons over 20 years for Labour's decline was excellent.
Here are 10 similar reasons we will be giving if NOM/Lab led coalition win in 2023/4 (which I rate as a48% chance)
1 Southern losses to LD/Lab from middle class 2 Social care 3 Market failure in essential jobs 4 Inflation (in flashing lights) 5 Jobs for the boys 6 Brexit consequences 7 Midland and northern wall stay at home 8 SNP wipeout 9 Boris's wheels came off 10 NHS problem of supply and demand proves insurmountable
and that's without direct mention of immigration or Covid.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
The issue we have is that it's clear there are intermittent and store / petrol station specific issues.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
And do you think those issues are being reported proportionately?
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
I think it's very varied. Here in SE London I've seen almost no evidence of shortages. When I was in the Scottish Islands over the summer though there were empty shelves everywhere, and things like bread and milk were in short supply, not just dill or parmesan shavings or whatever. I imagine that high population density areas in SE England will be the last areas to be hit. I'm sure we will muddle through and the mostly well-off folk on here will be fine as prices of basic necessities go up. I am not worried, personally, but if I were on a low income I would be absolutely fucking terrified right now.
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.
I’m all for controlled immigration and calling in the skills we need and, you’re right, this is clearly a case of it. I don’t understand the reticence either.
Because the government knows that the temporary visas will become permanent. Because UK management still dreams of those lovely, cheap Bulgarians....
Tests will also be made shorter by removing the ‘reversing exercise’ element – and for vehicles with trailers, the ‘uncoupling and recoupling’ exercise
...but reversing accidents are the ones that kill old ladies who cross behind the truck. Now is it a justifiable defence for a driver facing a death by careless driving charge to claim "no one trained me to look out for old ladies crossing blind behind me"? I work in an industry where we kill more people than any other, primarily through vehicle and pedestrian conflicts. This is nonsense!
I'm sorry, but my greatest fears for the unravelling of genuinely sensible health and safety legislation and regulation, post Brexit are coming true.
On occasions, safety rules are not just red tape they have a purpose.
This is Scott. It hasn't been removed. FBPE : Full-on Bullshitters Pro-EU. Pity there isn't an L in FBPE.
Fair enough - it sounds a reasonable move. The only thing that does need to be asked is why this wasn't done anyway? Was it a bit of meaningless bureaucracy that they forgot to get rid of? Or are there safety considerations that are being put to one side because they're seen as minor?
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.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
I think in your case your first points were eerily similar to those made by a few pop ups in recent times about how Covid was spiralling out of control etc etc. I think you were expressing your genuine opinion, but were unfortunate in being mistaken for a deliberate troll, or worse.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
I think everyone knows that it is limited as you say, no one is unable to buy food only because of shortages or unable to fill up their car. So it is at minor nuisance level for those not involved in the impacted industries.
But if the press and those industries had not been complaining loudly do you really think the government would have bothered doing anything at all? At least we have finally started to increase the number of tests we offer.
Without the "political" agenda, the situation would get worse and worse, highlighting problems so they can be addressed is common sense imo not political.
That feels about right - it's the rough and ready way that democracies work, by budding problems being highlighted by screaming headlines and noisy pressure groups and special interests. It's erratic and vulgar and unpredictanle but it mostly sort of works. The main problem is that some groups don't get the treatment at all and just suffer in silence.
The HGV driver shortage is real, and it's likely to cause modferately severe problems at times. The impact of higher fuel prices is probably more serious in the medium term.
Say we get a weeks snow in the winter, how does supply look then? Or even a month of heavy rain slowing down traffic?
Just because its not a massive problem now, does not mean it might not be a massive problem down the line. Of course it is right that the government is under pressure to do more to help.
HGVs to use bus lanes, perhaps outside rush hours only, perhaps only when delivering food and essentials would help, but not seen it mentioned elsewhere. Seems a simple and low cost thing we can do.
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.
Absolutely it is I agree.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
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.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left the PB Tory club, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
“Trucks are in short supply, and the worsening driver shortage has made the recruitment and retention of these more difficult than ever, as private fleet owners are competing for them with the trucking industry.
To navigate through the turbulent market, Crane’s analysts diagnosed a need for more collaboration with transport providers, involving better use of data. Mr Jindel raised a more basic form of collaboration by making the trucker’s job easier, such as not having a driver wait several hours for his truck to be loaded.
This requires a change in mindset. “Shippers have always taken the attitude ‘the trucker needs me, he will wait’,” he said”
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
That is quite a remarkable piece of autobiographical writing.
Actually his speech was quite entertaining and well received
‘We go live to Big_G Towers in North Wales for a reaction..’
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.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
Will the last PB Tory turn out the light... Assuming it's still working, of course.
“ European road transport firms are racing towards a driver shortage crisis of 150,000 unfilled jobs, according to new research from Transport Intelligence. In a report released this week, European Road Freight Transport 2018, the supply chain analyst shows that in just six countries – the UK, Germany, France, Denmark Sweden and Norway – the shortage of drivers adds up to 127,500.
The UK leads the way with a shortage of 52,000 drivers, but is closely followed by Germany at 45,000 vacancies – with predictions that this could increase by a staggering 28,000 each year.
This gap in the labour market has been partly filled by an influx of East Europeans, but the report warns there is a limit as to how much this will ease the driver shortage.“
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
Despite a warning message of late running of 45-60 minutes, the online test got done on time and the news, good I guess, is that it doesn’t look like I am going to be condemned to another week of sunshine, good food and abundant fuel and will be allowed to come home tomorrow. Another five minutes to be sure.
Two years ago we would never have believed the palaver we have to go through nowadays to do the things we always took for granted.
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'm Spartacus!....
Have you?
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
Fresh vegetables and salad stuff in Tesco Pembroke Dock is always very patchy. Asparagus is barely above twig stage when there. Acres of bananas only. Very few carrots. strawberries/raspberries/grapes. Sometimes no diet coke. Prices have gone up as well. There used to be a lot of clubcard money off, but not there now.
(I'm glad someone remembers the Sparticus reference btw...)
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 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.
If it is for more than pin money you need to do a lot of hours to make a living delivering parcels. They are up early to go load vans and then driving till well into evening , plus they have to fund their own transport etc. If you are a breadwinner it is a tough gig.
Is that vans in livery?
If not, there's a fantastic competitive advantage there for electric power.
Only a few have livery , eg UPS, DPD, majority are just guys in white vans or even cars working for the various courier companies on a parcel by parcel basis. You can make money but need to work your butt off as I believe it is well under £2 a time. Imagine they hope for lots of parcels in small area to help get decent ratio. But guys who deliver here have been to a depot at crack of dawn and then driven 30/40 miles before start off.
From July 2020 to July 2021 our Amazon deliveries came from the Carlisle Depot. That was a 80 mile / 2 hour drive before the deliveries began (I did check and they were being paid extra for the initial journey).
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.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
Have we found a Starmer fan yet?
There are plenty, including myself, who say he is "not too bad", "better than others say", "no one obviously better available" but have we found anyone who is a real fan, excited by him and talks him up?
There must be one even though I can't think of them at the moment, but to say they are equivalent in numbers here to Boris fan boys is absurd.
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.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
Will the last PB Tory turn out the light... Assuming it's still working, of course.
It’s going to turn itself off any second, according to the latest media panic.
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.
All EU countries are experiencing shortages. Sure, ours is a bit more pronounced as our market adjusts but it will.
Ours is rather more acute if the overall European shortfall is estimated at 500,000 and our share is estimated north of 100,000, and that's before we get to the self inflicted wound
Well, that is what people wanted - an end to very high immigration. If the result of that is temporary driver shortages but we end up with a new equilibrium of higher wages and better working conditions for HGV drivers, together with a level of immigration that commands popular consent - then who's to say they were wrong?
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
Yep, that section struck me at the time, more for the lack of self awareness that it applied precisely to the life and works of one Boris Johnson than anything else. Unless it was genius level self satire of course…
He was trolling us.
Surely not, Big G? Trolling us? Or healthy debate?
I have this image of the ghost of Jim Callaghan exiting the aircraft and in chorus with all the PB Boris fanbois exclaiming "crisis, what crisis?"
Sunny Jim never said it when he was alive though.
It is nonetheless an urban myth that lives on in the British psyche.
In that case scratch out Jim, and just leave it as a chorus of PB fanbois.
I have a soft spot for Sunny Jim as he was an old friend of my grandparents. I remember chatting to him as a child at their golden wedding anniversary.
If we did generally run out of fuel and gas supplies for a time then Starmer would likely lead the polls as Hague did in 2000.
Although a lot of it seems to be mainly the pressure on supplies as countries all come out of lockdown
In 2000 it was a campaign led by later to be Conservative AM Bryndley Williams and some Muppet farmer from Monmouth with the approval of William Hague and the Conservative Party. So what's you point?
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.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Speaking as a millenial snowflake,* that's not really my experience. There's plenty of fire, but it seems mostly to be back and forth with those that give it out also receiving it. I can't say that I've ever felt attacked, nor even been insulted, that I can remember. I've been told I'm wrong plenty of times, but that's not the same thing.
*I am however white and male, so maybe my experience is unrepresentative on non-white or non-male. We are, I think, white, male and - to an extent - boomer dominated.
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?
I have no problem with bringing in truckers but where are you going to find them with half a million shortfall in Europe
We would use some of Philip's money to pay them. Literally beggar thy neighbour but hey, that's the market solution. Right, Philip?
You do realise that are neighbours are in a different market, not our market, don't you?
Who would have thought Britain leaving the EU would have caused trans continental freight chaos?
“ The air cargo industry has urged governments and stakeholders to prepare for what is expected to be a highly challenging air freight peak season.
The International Air Cargo Association (Tiaca) said yesterday that the industry is facing “unprecedented challenges” in the fourth quarter, with demand easily outstripping supply.
Noting that port congestion, delays and the rising costs of sea freight are sending desperate shippers to air freight, Tiaca said that combined with online shopping events, as well as the traditional peak, “the stress on the system is expected to grow substantially”.
It urged the industry to prepare, especially in the face of Covid-related restrictions on workforces, particularly in Asia.”
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.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
PB Tories don’t necessarily support every pratfall from HMG, but they can generally be relied upon to push various gammony tropes.
In that they function a bit like a herd of columnists for a right wing tabloid.
It is fascinating from an ideological perspective though to see the case for Brexit collapse in real time. They seem to have settled, for the moment, on the idea that Brexit was about social justice for HGV drivers.
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.
It's one of the joys of PB - to argue with intelligent people of opposite views. .
It really isn't. For newcomers who aren't baby boomer white males it's frequently a hostile bear pit.
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
Woe betide you if you refuse to drink the PB Tory kool-ade.
How many people are still genuine PB Tories? Me, Charles, Marquee Mark and Sandpit off the top of my head (Mr Ed probably too but he is more GOP).
PT and MaxPB have left, I think even Casino is moving so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
Have we found a Starmer fan yet?
There are plenty, including myself, who say he is "not too bad", "better than others say", "no one obviously better available" but have we found anyone who is a real fan, excited by him and talks him up?
There must be one even though I can't think of them at the moment, but to say they are equivalent in numbers here to Boris fan boys is absurd.
I am just waiting for Stramer to actually do something. Kicking a few of the loonies out was a start. Not an end. Not even a middle.
Kinnock was doing more than this, at this stage. And before you say it, 1997 couldn't have happened without the spadework that Kinnock put in.
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.
In our class-ridden society I can't help noticing that about half my Sainsbury delivery drivers are older people (mostly but not all men) speaking in well-educated accents. I've chatted to a few about their previous jobs - redudant office work and one former teacher. They are so uniformly cheerful that it has to be company policy to require it, but most seem genuinely content - "takes up time but driving around delivering trays of food is pretty easy money" said one. They're on a bit more than minimum wage but they do say the pay isn't great - seems to be £9-10/hour, which doesn't get you far in Surrey.
Labour to give first time buyers priority on new builds, actually a good policy from Starmer.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355
Comments
Decent, gentle, well-made, non-confrontational, intelligent and informed points are rare.
A notice circulated yesterday that all the main supermarket stations were open for fuel
I'm sorry, but my greatest fears for the unravelling of genuinely sensible health and safety legislation and regulation, post Brexit are coming true.
On occasions, safety rules are not just red tape they have a purpose.
DVLA are being slow turning things around, understandably, and are working to "when we received it" order.
Ministers need to ensure LGV license transactions are heavily prioritised. They are currently up to September 7th:
Type of application Date currently being processed
Apply for a first vocational driving licence 7 September 2021
Renew a vocational driving licence 12 July 2021
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/dvla-coronavirus-covid-19-update
Even so, it can't be more than pin money.
I think there are some who are doing it on foot, with a trolley thing. I'm pretty sure someone mentioned that the other day, locally.
Paging Doctor Freud!
We still cling with part of our minds to the infantile belief that the world was made for our gratification and pleasure and we combine this narcissism with an assumption of our own immortality.
We believe that someone else will clear up the mess we make, because that is what someone else has always done.
We trash our habitats again and again with the inductive reasoning that we have got away with it so far, and therefore we will get away with it again.
I went round M&S and Iceland yesterday - not problems whatsoever. My wife shops three times a week - she's never complained of not being able to get a single bean.
I don't think it's "made up" but I think it's limited to patches in certain areas at certain times of the day, and is otherwise being massively blown up to be an existential crisis by those with papers to sell and a political agenda.
You have evidence to the contrary?
Again, let my go back to the reason why the Budget is now in October rather than March.
Software developers (including those at HMRC) need time to update the software to reflect the changes being announced. They can't do it instantly regardless of the money you offer them.
I have fond recollections of the only time I've ever ridden in an HGV cab, when my (now) wife and I hitch-hiked to Dublin from Cambridge. The driver was a top bloke, really funny. My abiding memory was his visceral hatred of coach drivers. The cab was pretty comfy but I'd say it was a lonely job judging by how chatty he was.
Chatted to the driver about shortages and he said it was all 'bollx' and no sign of it that he can see. He claimed it was all being made up by the media.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ADPovZ7DWGw
But not behind me or my loved ones thank you very much!
Except Maggie had been PM for a decade when she used the Royal We.
Yet because a lot of people on here have not seen any problems they don't believe there is an issue.
It reminds me of the 8 year old who did a scientific experiment to confirm if the tooth fairy existed. He proved that the fairy didn't exist and then discovered his parents no longer gave him money for lost teeth.
But if the press and those industries had not been complaining loudly do you really think the government would have bothered doing anything at all? At least we have finally started to increase the number of tests we offer.
Without the "political" agenda, the situation would get worse and worse, highlighting problems so they can be addressed is common sense imo not political.
Here's the Factcheck:
https://fullfact.org/online/hgv-reversing-test/
HGV driving is hard. You work very long hours, a long way from your family most of the week, and drive boring routes all day and then sleep in a lay-by. Often you don't even have time to stop for a pee. And, everyone else on the road hates you and is rude to you.
It's not just about the money.
To suggest 5 live in the morning is a radio phone in show is really rather pathetic, but maybe it does not suit your political narrative
If as I suspect the consequences are zero those checks won't be done to the previous standard.
Unless it was genius level self satire of course…
One of the floor managers who works there said supply is getting noticeably worse, she's expecting Christmas to be a nightmare. Time will tell.
I wonder if the Govt will reverse ferret on this?
They should at least go back to the IDS intension for UC - restore the 10% of cuts by cash terms freeze since 2015, and put the taper at around 50%.
I have friends, family and colleagues all over the country. Not a single one has raised this as an issue - the only ones that do are the usual FBPE suspects on Twitter and the media hacks that retweet them, so I take it with a massive pinch of salt.
The Government and supermarket chains are talking about challenges in some areas but it's far from the national crisis it's made out to be.
Bolsonaro says U.K.’s Johnson sought emergency food deal from Brazil.
https://twitter.com/reutersuk/status/1441191934572183552?s=21
If you want a shop, my great-grandfather's shop - equipped for hairdressing plus a flat - is coming up in the next few months. Guide price will be about 40k .
Mum unfortunately popped her clogs 3 days before it was coming up in Nov 2019, and it has been stuck in the estate - empty - ever since. Is that vans in livery?
If not, there's a fantastic competitive advantage there for electric power.
Apart from one Saturday where my local Sainsbury’s had no rice, pasta and the frozen aisles were empty I’ve experienced no shortages at all either at Sainsbury’s or my local Tesco or my local costcutter.
I see often, usually FBPE type remainers, going on about shortages and posting pictures of them yet my reality is this is not the case.
The HGV driver shortage is real, and it's likely to cause modferately severe problems at times. The impact of higher fuel prices is probably more serious in the medium term.
This is all occuring on Johnson's watch, whether it is his direct fault or not, he bends over and takes the caning, but a handful of posters on here are wringing their hands "ooh, it not the fault of Brexit, it's not the fault of Boris", s*** happens"
Do they have the 440ml cans of original coke over there?
The cognitive dissonance is strong with this one.
The British Embassy in Brazil disputed Bolsonaro's account, saying that what the Brazilian president said was not its recollection of the facts.
Although a lot of it seems to be mainly the pressure on supplies as countries all come out of lockdown
Here are 10 similar reasons we will be giving if NOM/Lab led coalition win in 2023/4 (which I rate as a48% chance)
1 Southern losses to LD/Lab from middle class
2 Social care
3 Market failure in essential jobs
4 Inflation (in flashing lights)
5 Jobs for the boys
6 Brexit consequences
7 Midland and northern wall stay at home
8 SNP wipeout
9 Boris's wheels came off
10 NHS problem of supply and demand proves insurmountable
and that's without direct mention of immigration or Covid.
I'm sure we will muddle through and the mostly well-off folk on here will be fine as prices of basic necessities go up. I am not worried, personally, but if I were on a low income I would be absolutely fucking terrified right now.
1. I am buying a few necessary essentials
2. You are stocking up
3 They are panic buying
(Checks cupboards)
Just because its not a massive problem now, does not mean it might not be a massive problem down the line. Of course it is right that the government is under pressure to do more to help.
HGVs to use bus lanes, perhaps outside rush hours only, perhaps only when delivering food and essentials would help, but not seen it mentioned elsewhere. Seems a simple and low cost thing we can do.
Which is a good thing. An end to low wages is literally what people voted for.
Why are you upset about the end of low wages?
PT and MaxPB have left the PB Tory club, BigG does not like Boris, I think even Casino has gone off the government so the idea this site is just full of white baby boomer Boris and Brexit fans is absurd.
In fact there are probably at least as many Scottish Nationalists and Starmer Labour supporters on here now as Boris supporters and once you add in the LDs and Greens too Boris supporters are certainly in the minority on here
“Trucks are in short supply, and the worsening driver shortage has made the recruitment and retention of these more difficult than ever, as private fleet owners are competing for them with the trucking industry.
To navigate through the turbulent market, Crane’s analysts diagnosed a need for more collaboration with transport providers, involving better use of data. Mr Jindel raised a more basic form of collaboration by making the trucker’s job easier, such as not having a driver wait several hours for his truck to be loaded.
This requires a change in mindset. “Shippers have always taken the attitude ‘the trucker needs me, he will wait’,” he said”
https://theloadstar.com/shippers-face-tough-choices-in-the-us-trucking-market-as-costs-escalate/
In that case scratch out Jim, and just leave it as a chorus of PB fanbois.
“ European road transport firms are racing towards a driver shortage crisis of 150,000 unfilled jobs, according to new research from Transport Intelligence.
In a report released this week, European Road Freight Transport 2018, the supply chain analyst shows that in just six countries – the UK, Germany, France, Denmark Sweden and Norway – the shortage of drivers adds up to 127,500.
The UK leads the way with a shortage of 52,000 drivers, but is closely followed by Germany at 45,000 vacancies – with predictions that this could increase by a staggering 28,000 each year.
This gap in the labour market has been partly filled by an influx of East Europeans, but the report warns there is a limit as to how much this will ease the driver shortage.“
https://www.bifa.org/news/articles/2018/dec/truck-driver-shortage-crisis-now-spreading-across-the-whole-of-europe
Two years ago we would never have believed the palaver we have to go through nowadays to do the things we always took for granted.
(I'm glad someone remembers the Sparticus reference btw...)
There are plenty, including myself, who say he is "not too bad", "better than others say", "no one obviously better available" but have we found anyone who is a real fan, excited by him and talks him up?
There must be one even though I can't think of them at the moment, but to say they are equivalent in numbers here to Boris fan boys is absurd.
The Italian courts will decide on his release or extradition to Spain, where he faces charges of rebellion over the unilateral Declaration of Independence of #Catalonia.
https://twitter.com/EuropeElects/status/1441292511738150912?s=20
*I am however white and male, so maybe my experience is unrepresentative on non-white or non-male. We are, I think, white, male and - to an extent - boomer dominated.
We voted to leave the Single Market.
“ The air cargo industry has urged governments and stakeholders to prepare for what is expected to be a highly challenging air freight peak season.
The International Air Cargo Association (Tiaca) said yesterday that the industry is facing “unprecedented challenges” in the fourth quarter, with demand easily outstripping supply.
Noting that port congestion, delays and the rising costs of sea freight are sending desperate shippers to air freight, Tiaca said that combined with online shopping events, as well as the traditional peak, “the stress on the system is expected to grow substantially”.
It urged the industry to prepare, especially in the face of Covid-related restrictions on workforces, particularly in Asia.”
https://theloadstar.com/prepare-now-for-a-very-challenging-air-freight-peak-urges-tiaca/
In that they function a bit like a herd of columnists for a right wing tabloid.
It is fascinating from an ideological perspective though to see the case for Brexit collapse in real time. They seem to have settled, for the moment, on the idea that Brexit was about social justice for HGV drivers.
Kinnock was doing more than this, at this stage. And before you say it, 1997 couldn't have happened without the spadework that Kinnock put in.
It also would cap the amount foreign property investors can purchase in new developments, give councils more powers to buy land for new homes and reform rules regarding how much developers must contribute for affordable housing
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-58670355