COASTLINK CONFERENCE REVIEW
UK TRUCKING: THE HOT TOPIC With the September Coastlink online conference coinciding with the UK petrol delivery crisis the shortage of truck drivers was the hot topic. Felicity Landon reports
8 The UK lags behind Continental Europe in the care and treatment of its hauliers
As petrol stations were running dry in many areas of the UK and drivers queued anxiously wherever fuel was available, the timing of Coastlink’s focus on Short Sea Feeder Shipping: Navigation through road freight supply chain challenges could not have been more significant. And one of the speakers, John Lucy, Head of International Transport, Road Haulage Association, certainly did not hold back with his comments. Asked about terms and conditions for truck drivers, he said: “I think we are reaping now what the industry has sown for three decades. There has been a chase to the bottom in terms of price and service which has been aided and abetted by lower cost eastern European haulage operators. A continual influx of low-cost labour into the market has kept rates at an artificial and unsustainable rate.” This was a bubble that had been waiting to burst, he said, and it was going to take time for the market to adjust. Adding to the shortage of drivers, he noted that a lack of hardware was another challenge. “Trucks and trailers can take 12 months to supply because there are problems with steel and a manufacturing backlog. It is a whole perfect storm.” Lucy also noted that congestion and capacity issues in some ports meant drivers collecting or delivering freight were sometimes being delayed at ports for hours, exacerbating the problem of the shortage of drivers. We are seeing “probably the most disruptive time in supply chains that most of us will have experienced in our careers”, he said.
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“These are just unprecedented times. The World Bank has estimated that this disruptive period is going to last for 18 months at least before some new normal trading conditions settle down.” The combination of drivers retiring, European drivers leaving the UK because of Brexit and the impact on haulage companies of updated IR35 rules (on employment) had driven the shortage in the UK, he said. However, he emphasised that the UK was not the only country suffering. “Driver shortages started in the US last year and have spread throughout the world. Every European country is experiencing some level of driver shortage.” Returning to the UK perspective, he said: “We basically outsourced the majority of our logistics jobs to European Union drivers, because as it [the EU] expanded further east, it allowed more drivers to come into the market. Before 1992, when the UK last had Customs and permits on vehicles going into Europe, over 90 per cent of those crossing the straits had a GB sticker. Now it is four or five per cent.” Pre Brexit, EU hauliers used to spend ‘a lot of time tramping around the UK doing domestic jobs’, which also kept down UK domestic rates, he noted. BETTER TIMES AHEAD? Lucy continued that there is some optimism that the UK haulage sector, despite the current problems, seems to be going from strength to strength. “We are now seeing a
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