It was always clear that food and goods supply chains in the UK would be hit by Brexit. Now the Brexit chickens are coming home to roost as many retailers warn that they are facing acute shortages and warning that Christmas stockbuilding may be jeopardised. McDonalds is having to ration milk shakes. More widely, supermarkets and producers depending on “just-in-time” logistics are finding supplies of anything from concrete to perishables difficult to source. And such pressure will become still sharper when grace periods and waivers expire and another layer of bureaucracy is applied to imports from the EU.
Cross-border controls are, however, only part of the problem. Acute shortages of qualified lorry drivers are in no small measure due to the freeze-out of EU drivers; HGV drivers are not among the list of eligible skilled occupations and hence are denied skilled work visas. The Road Haulage Association says there is a shortage of about 60,000 drivers and that there used to be about 60,000 drivers from the EU.
Attempts to recruit and train more indigenous drivers have been stymied by the sharp fall in driver-testing because of the Covid-19 pandemic – 25,000 fewer candidates passed their test in 2020 than in 2019 – and a drift of local drivers from haulage, driven out by low pay and excessively long hours. The average age of HGV drivers in the UK is now 55 while average pay differentials with supermarket workers have halved in recent years.
The challenges facing the UK haulage sector and structural weaknesses in the labour market that reflect a low-pay model largely driven by powerful retail companies’ competitive pressures, are not caused by Brexit, or the Covid crisis, but sharply exacerbated by them. Ironically, anti-immigrant Brexit supporters once claimed that low pay in the sector was attributable to competition from foreign drivers and that the UK would have no problem filling the gap left with its own new recruits. Another case, it seems, of Brexit wishful thinking.