Putting their feet up

Many of us are a little lazy in taking care to prepare for the unexpected. Under-inflated spare tyres in the boot (‘Oh I never get punctures’), torches with dead batteries (‘It worked last time I used it’), a soaking in the rain (‘It was sunny when I left home’).

There has been a shortage of lorry drivers for the last twenty years or so. But the problem seemed to go away during, and as a result of, the recession. A reduction in freight moved, meant a reduction in lorry mileage, which meant a reduced demand for lorry drivers. And a vanished problem.

But this year’s healthy growth in the economy has meant the return of a problem that we should all have expected. Getting sufficient numbers of drivers for the jobs we have in hand is now proving to be a big, big pain.

And this year there is a giant complication on top, and one which could amount to a step change in the extent of the transport industry’s difficulties.

The 10th September 2014 represented the closing date for the completion of the first five year phase requiring licence qualified lorry drivers to undergo 35 hours of additional periodic training designed to keep them up to date with the latest driving techniques, safety, fuel efficiency, regulations, best practice etc – the EU Driver Certificate of Competence (Driver CPC). Over a five year period 35 hours of training is not all that much to expect from drivers of long, heavy and powerful vehicles sharing the roads with cars and more vulnerable road users. Just one day per year. So no argument about the need, value and importance of this top-up training.

But, sadly, there is a cost involved. For many self-employed or agency drivers there has been a need to accomplish the extra training – and pay for it – themselves. And the result has been that, by the beginning of September, it was clear that some 76,000 drivers who had set out on the Driver CPC maybe four or five years ago, did not look like completing it by 10 September. And the conclusion was that they had decided that the game was not worth the candle and had effectively ‘retired’ from the road transport industry and gone off to do something else.

That 76,000 could represent as much as 10 per cent of the total number of personnel in the ‘professional’ lorry driving force (as opposed to non-vocational drivers). Clearly, a loss of skilled labour of 10% would impact badly on any sector, let alone one which has a history of shortages and is failing to attract new recruits.

When the subject was discussed at a recent conference of transport managers I attended, over 80% said that this Christmas they anticipated serious problems as a consequence of the shortage. And 25% of them even suggested that deliveries would be lost due to there being no drivers available to make them! So a very serious problem not just for the transport industry but for the whole of the supply chain and for the man or woman in the street as a consumer.

Of course the Driver CPC is not the only problem. For years logistics has suffered from a poor image, and goodness knows, I’ve banged on about the consequences of that often enough in this column. But who wants to be a lorry driver carrying out multi-drop deliveries in congested city centres. Or having to put up with very poor on-the-road service and comfort facilities for those involved with trunking? And, as for attracting more women into the profession than the derisory two per cent at present – well, little chance with the absence of civilised washrooms and toilet facilities.

Add to that the high cost of training to obtain the original licence (about £3,000), and the seemingly limited funding available to carry it out, plus high insurance premiums for young drivers, together with the ever older average age profile of lorry drivers, and it can quickly be seen that this problem is going to get worse and worse. The industry is leaking older drivers at one end of the age scale and failing to sign on young replacements at the other.

The laws of supply and demand normally ensure that problems of this type solve themselves. In this case a shortage of drivers ought to result in higher wage offers, resulting in a migration of drivers to the better payers, with operators lower down the scale playing catch-up to sign on replacements. Part of the problem is, however, that the notoriously low margin levels in transport and logistics mean that the money is simply just not there. Which leads to...

Well, which leads to potential closures. No drivers, no business.

Transport has a well-earned reputation for a ‘can-do’ attitude. Getting the goods to the customer where and when they are wanted, notwithstanding the problems of late supply, traffic congestion, bad weather, hostile loading/unloading regulations and high operating costs, even a driver shortage, are the way of the transport world.

I hope that I am crying wolf, and I may be. After all, the industry has had this problem for years and pretty much always got away with it in the past. But, this Christmas, the driver agencies seem more pessimistic than I can ever recall in the past. And after the massive Driver CPC fall-out which seems to be the case, we may see a problem that is just too much for some operations.

My advice to transport managers looking at their driver demands for this Christmas is to confront this problem sooner, rather than later. For sure it’s going to be difficult.