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A major driver training organisation in the UK, which is part of a major driver recruitment agency, today claimed that the UK’s haulage industry risks falling into the same crisis of recruitment seen during the height of the pandemic five years ago unless it “tackles a looming retirement crisis”, with 55% of today’s professional drivers aged between 50 and 65 and little interest in the occupation from school leavers. John Keelan-Edwards of Driver Hire Training mentioned the lack of overseas drivers that we ‘enjoyed’ during the post-2004 years and also the lack of diversity in the profession. He suggested temporary sign-on bonuses but said that the biggest necessity was persuading school leavers of “the fulfilling and varied careers they could have” as lorry drivers. There is no mention, at least in this little article, of the reason why people do not want to be truck drivers anymore, and are leaving the industry, which is the poor treatment and facilities we are expected to tolerate. Tomasz Orsyński wrote an article in July 2021 detailing twenty reasons for the shortage, which includes some of the points I make here, and nothing has changed.

In the late 2010s and early 2020s, I was doing mostly “class 1”, or articulated/semi truck work. This was for a mixture of mostly air and palletised freight companies and the Royal Mail. In 2021 I let my air freight clearance lapse, because I did not want to work for any of the operators around Heathrow anymore. The work was tedious, often involving sitting for hours at the cargo sheds around the airport. Facilities were extremely poor: the ‘Horseshoe’ had one toilet facility for all the male drivers consisting of one urinal, one actual toilet and two sinks. At bonded warehouses (which store air freight which has already been security cleared), the law states that a visiting driver has a right to use a toilet and should be escorted if need be, but they would sometimes refuse if it wasn’t convenient for them (at one point I was told to defecate in a bush if I was desperate). One of said companies (a subcontractor to several major airlines) sent me on a trip to Manchester, and staff at their depots kept me waiting for hours at more than one of the ports of call resulting in my exceeding my 15-hour working day on two occasions, and then refused to pay me for the full day as it would make the violation too obvious. (They told me I should have rung them at one of the places concerned; they should have known I was doing the Manchester run, and got the freight out quickly as it was time critical.)

I did three or four separate stints at the Royal Mail between 2017 and 2023 (I had previously worked for them at Vauxhall, since demolished to make way for the new American embassy and luxury developments at Nine Elms) but that was driving small trucks on local routes, not big trucks on ‘trunk’ routes). On the first of these I got a lecture from the transport manager at Woking for stopping mid-journey to use a toilet, having found the toilets at their Coventry depot inadequate (meaning: few in number, dirty, smelly and crowded). My most recent encounter with them ended after an encounter with a rude “health and safety” jobsworth at their new national hub outside Daventry, who barked at me to put my yellow jacket on when walking ten paces from the door of the building to the door of my truck cab in broad daylight on a 30ºC (or more) summer day. I then had to explain myself to another jobsworth at the local depot in Greenford, west London, and that ended with him telling me not to come in for any more shifts. This local depot had an infestation of rats, one of which I saw in the room where the staff vending machines and water fountain were located; I was informed that said rats had been disturbed by the nearby works on the new high-speed railway. Royal Mail insists on long-sleeved jackets, unlike almost any other logistics company (a lot of construction companies insist on high-visibility trousers as well); these are tolerable at night and in colder weather, but being made of woven plastic are extremely uncomfortable when it is hot, something the organisation has not taken into account at all. The same Daventry depot, despite being newly built, had several toilets out of commission that day (it has fewer toilets than the old National Distribution Centre round the corner), but had time to employ a lackey to drive around in a big car looking for petty “health and safety” breaches to nag people about.

In my experience, the bigger the company, the longer the list of rules and the worse environment it will be to work at. The biggest offenders are the international logistics companies with three letters for names. In the month or so after leaving Royal Mail in 2023, I had a two-week stint at a printworks in west London, which was not perfect by any means (moving pallets stacked high with heavy printed material is hard work) and the cab stank of the previous driver’s food, with crisp dust you could taste in the air (another common problem), but I mostly delivered to and from small printing companies and was required to wear a yellow jacket only once, on the last delivery to a depot of one of those three-letter companies. The jackets have their place, but have spread far beyond that; they are seen (or posed) as an essential guarantee of safety, when in reality they seem to be a substitute for common sense. As truck drivers, we deal with hazards all the time, and most of them are not clad in fluorescent jackets. The way to avoid accidents is for the driver to look where he or she is going and for others not to do stupid things like walk in front of a moving vehicle or behind it when reversing.

As Tomasz Orsyński put it, drivers are treated like thieves; I would say the rules at many sites presume we are thieves, idiots or both. He mentions the practice of expecting drivers to hand in their keys and sit in a waiting room, or even a cage, while being loaded or unloaded; this is often in addition to the truck being physically immobilised to stop it being driven off the bay. When a vehicle is being “live loaded”, i.e. loaded through the back while the trailer is connected to a tractor unit, or it is a single truck, one of these measures is perfectly sensible, but immobilising the truck makes all the others unnecessary. Some depots do not allow the driver to disconnect the truck so as to remain in the vehicle, and others demand we hand over the keys and wait in their waiting room (with no guarantee of how long) even when the truck is not coupled. It appears that somewhere along the line, a group of managers has sat in a room and brainstormed everything that could go wrong, or has ever been known to, and everything they could do to prevent them, then done all of them when only one or two would be sufficient. The measures are imposed from the top down, not in consultation with drivers who typically are not unionised at all. The result is that drivers are told: these are the customers and what the customer wants, the customer gets, and if you don’t like it, tough.

So, you can go round schools telling the kids that truck driving is some sort of enjoyable, varied career where they can get to see the country and meet people, but the truth is that large parts of it have been taken over by a few small companies where the senior management are remote from the workforce; they are impersonal and have a long list of demeaning, often pointless rules. The family firms where the boss started out as a driver in his dad’s firm are mostly long gone. There will be a lot of waiting around, a lot of repetition and a lot of physical work and facilities will be poor. A lot of schoolchildren will be used to that, of course, but might have been looking forward to being treated like an adult, something that is getting rarer and rarer in this industry. If they want to recruit or retain drivers, they will need to look at how they treat the ones they have, because people will not tolerate being treated like dirt indefinitely.

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