>> "Ministers bowed to business pressure on Saturday and announced they would issue temporary visas to 5,000 foreign heavy goods vehicle drivers to help tackle major labour shortages in the logistics industry."
>> "The government move came after panic buying followed BP saying last week that as many as 100 service stations had been disrupted and several forecourts closed because of a shortage of tanker drivers."
>> "Madderson welcomed the government’s plans to ease visa requirements for foreign workers but said the biggest problems were at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, a branch of the Department for Transport, where there was a significant backlog of lorry driver applicants looking to start training.
"
It turns out making your economy dependent on migrant workers then shutting them out with no preparation is bad policy.
It would be interesting to see who will answer the call.
This is a few months visa, which means come to UK, supply us with goods, make some money and fuck off.
That kind of opportunities are very nice for the youth where you go to some foreign country in the summer work a bit party a lot and tell the experience to everyone for years.
For a grown up to come to UK for a few moths of a skilled job doesn't add up that easily. Truck driving licenses are expensive and are for mature people since they are trusted with very expensive and powerful machinery. Who does exactly goes to a foreign country to do that job? It must be someone who is retired and does it every now and then to make some extra buck or someone who is unhireable on a regular job.
What the people are supposed to do when the 3 months of visa expire? Go back and hunt for a job that they just left? It doesn't make sense unless the money is extremely good and in the UK the money is not good, it's not like the US.
After the Brexit referandum in 2016, EU nationals had the privilege to keep their right indefinitely, with almost no paperwork and cost up until the beginning of 2021 and many did not take the opportunity.
If they recruit people from outside of Europe, how do they plan to make them leave the UK? EU is rich, even Easter Europe is a fine place and nobody will choose to work illegally in the UK(if they wanted that, they could have stayed legally).
People from poorer places will want to stay, that's why you have the Calais issue. People from richer places cannot be paid good enough to come to the UK.
“[EU licence holders cannot] check how many points you have in Britain using DVLA online services, even though they DO put penalty points and other information on your record. That puts them in the worse position when competing for jobs with UK licence holders, as many companies, third party licence check services or insurance companies simply won’t bother with checking the record of the UE licence holder, as it is simply too complicated. Of course, you can solve this problem by exchanging your EU licence for a British one (which, to drive trucks, you have to do after a maximum of five years, or when you hit 45 years, whichever is later), but with Brexit, many drivers – younger, or those who just wanted to come here for a short period of time – are not willing to do it now, as while EU licence is still valid in Britain, British licences are not valid in the UE any more, which means that they would need to obtain International Driving Licence to go for holidays to their own country, and if they decide to look for a job back in the EU, they cannot even start until they exchange their British licence back.”
>After the Brexit referandum in 2016, EU nationals had the privilege to keep their right indefinitely, with almost no paperwork and cost up until the beginning of 2021 and many did not take the opportunity.
The amount of applications by EU nationals to remain in the UK exceeded the UK government's recorded total number of EU citizens residing in the country by two million (5.7 million vs 3.7 million, respectively), which raises other questions about what went wrong with the former statistic
>If they recruit people from outside of Europe, how do they plan to make them leave the UK? EU is rich, even Easter Europe is a fine place and nobody will choose to work illegally in the UK(if they wanted that, they could have stayed legally).
Unless things have changed significantly between now and ten years ago (when I knew a handful of people who drove HGVs) many of the jobs even then were organised by recruitment agencies on temporary contacts. I don't see why now it'll be any different given that the wage pressure is there to pay them well.
Problem with retired people is the mandatory health checks and that licenses for commercial transport requires refresh every few years with extra training. So if you aren't in industry you lose it in a few years.
Thanks a lot for the link - the article is very long, but it was interesting. I agree with it.
My father (retired) used to work for a logistics company, he was one of those who organized the deliveries (get new clients, write down proposals, compute costs, get in touch with border admins to clarify requirements/documents/approvals, etc..., all that admin&logistical stuff to have ultimately literally anything delivered from A to B).
Already at that time (~15 years ago) it was an extremely competitive business with very low earning margins and high risks (e.g. all kind of delivery delays as mentioned in the article, damages to the goods while driving or un/loading them or due to temperature/water, thieves, accidents, receiving company not being able to pay for the goods, strikes/events/whatever impacting the ETA of the delivery, etc...). I don't want to think what it has become now.
My father "lived that life" and he kind of liked it (a lot of personal responsability, had wide improvisation margins, etc), but once, on a particularily bad day, he told me directly "don't become a truck driver - it's already now a bad job and it will become worse".
He said that because the whole "poetic" side of being a truck driver (travel through many nations in Europe therefore being able to see a lot of stuff, deal with different kinds of people, be independent, etc...) got replaced by very strict delivery/pickup deadlines & monitoring & regulations - I DEFINITELY DO NOT WANT TO SAY that that's bad is general (e.g. I do love regulations about sleep time & truck maintenance, and as a company owner I would definitely like to know where my trucks are located, and deliveries/pickups are supposed to be done on time) but what I want to say is that their combination and the level of "how strict they are" can become toxic. The limits are "grey".
Nowadays truck drivers can get as stressed as a stock exchange broker but get a fraction of such a salary and in general their lives are very hard (thinking about family & living conditions while being on the road, which is most of the time). I guess that you must be born for that kind of profession + you need a lot of luck to land an "ok"-job in that area.
Concerning the Brexit & related extra truck driver visas I personally don't see that having a big impact on the current situation: admin effort does not change, risk (the articles reports about Calais - that's really a horrible situation) is still very real, in general it's just more reliable and less risky to deal with stuff in the EU (and Schengen) even if the profits are potentially not great.
Personally I think that there are other factors in play currently in this whole story (e.g. the Covid pandemic, the Suez-canal blockade, the container shortages, ...):
during the previous months we had in Switzerland because of all that several delays about buying all kind of stuff (never seen anything like that during the last 35 years - e.g. no plastic forks available, hehe), now things are slowly getting back to normal but retail delivery services have increased their prices, e.g. I'm changing flat right now and I have to pay ~150$ extra (each) to have my new bed & couch delivered to my flat (assembling is extra), which is as well for a swiss person not cheap and I think that in the past the same was priced max 50-100$ (or even included in the selling price especially for the couch) => I assume that the same happened as well in general to bigger truck shipments (e.g. from the manufacturers to the retail vendors), therefore I assume that e.g. Switzerland (for sure as well partially DE, FR, NL, ...) is basically "stealing" truck shipment capacity because it's just more remunerative (UK people are in my opinion more "picky" then others) and less risky => this makes the extra visas issued by the UK become just some background noise and that won't change unless the remunerations are increased.
IMHO the expected solution would be that the multinational companies who have drivers cruising e.g. from Spain to Poland can use the same drivers to run some UK deliveries as well. They go to a foreign country to do that job all the time, and it doesn't matter much for them if that foreign country is Spain, Sweden or UK.
Eastern Europe companies flood the rest of the EU with slave like, very cheap truck drivers that have no choice or see their families starve. They will send some of these and everybody will look away again. I believe to call goes to these companies, not to individuals.
> issue temporary visas to 5,000 foreign heavy goods vehicle drivers
Why on earth would these foreign drivers that could easily work on a permanent basis in Europe come to the UK on a temporary visum? Or are they now also going to pay them a lot more than other places? I'm which case... Kind of ironic that this whole brexit thing was started over keeping immigrants out, not about begging them to please come and save you for a lot more money?
Shapps (our transport secretary) is saying this isn't Brexit related. He told BBC Today: “Not only are there very large and even larger shortages in other EU countries like Poland and Germany, which clearly can’t be to do with Brexit, but actually because of Brexit I’ve been able to change the law and alter the way our driving tests operate in a way I could not have done if we were still part of the EU."
I'm completely in agreement with you though. Without Brexit I don't think it would be anywhere near this bad (however utterly irrational it may be).
It does provide an interesting A/B opportunity. You have all these countries in one economic union, and one that was in it for a long time, and now there's an opportunity to compare the depth of crises.
We're also having trouble finding drivers here in the US, but we're also ground zero for the app delivery gig thing and that's probably giving the worse-paid truck drivers options. I know there's been an explosion of app delivery services across Europe. Could that be a contributing factor?
There are driver shortages in Australia too, where people over 70 who've retired have to come back to work.
I don't really care for Brexit but its interesting how there have also been shortages of items at supermarkets in places that the same logic can't be applied. None for fuel though. But it's not always as clean cut.
Of course there are shortages in jobs with bad working conditions and low pay in other EU countries too - but, due to the continued access to workers from poor EU countries who are willing to do these jobs, these shortages are not nearly as bad as in the UK. So of course it's Brexit related!
> It turns out making your economy dependent on migrant workers then shutting them out with no preparation is bad policy.
What's been even worse policy is to have closed down so many train lines over the years, so now all of our roads are full of lorries 24/7. Thanks to the Beeching cuts:
The solution is not to import cheap labour to drive trucks, but to rebuild our railways, and use them for freight (feel free to use cheap foreign labour in this case). Fortunately the current government has agreed upon such things as:
Driving a tanker carrying fuel requires additional qualifications over your standard HGV licence so the pool is likely even smaller - this seems to have been glossed over by ministers in the press over the weekend.
The UK cabinet, comprised of former journalists, media "personalities" and PR industry hacks, only thinks in terms of the 24 hour news cycle: how to deflect blame, rile up their base, or throw dead cats.
What they are fundamentally incapable of doing is thinking and planning ahead beyond that cycle. Which is fine, so far, as they are greatly aided by their friends in the media, Britain's antiquated "democratic" FPTP system, and by the deep unblinking gullibility of their core voter.
Bad policy for all of the people who need petrol to drive; for all of the people who work at the (temporarily, thankfully) closed stations; and for anyone who works at businesses that rely on regular petrol supplies.
Basic functioning of the economy and of supply chains is an objective public good.
You're quoting the least votes option out of a poll, which is a very misleading way to present the data. Because 68% of British adults blamed Brexit, 70% blamed the current government and 76% blamed Covid (this was the top 3). Followed by several other options and then in the last place with only 33% people blamed the last labour government.
And all those figures included people that answered "somewhat" instead of full blame. Which may not be crazy because realistically all previous governments could "somewhat" have a blame in the state of things after their term.
The point is that it is way more than Lizardman-territory. If I were at the PC I'd have just copied the data out in full but I was going from memory on my phone.
I think that just tells us that many people treat opinion polls as an opportunity to say what they approve and disapprove of, whatever the actual question being asked is.
(And that's arguably rational behaviour, if you interpret the opinion poll question as saying "would you like to help give the media a stick to beat X with?")
Maybe that's just a proxy vote blaming the Labour party. Which are to blame (at least much more than 33%), because they're not producing a viable alternative to conservatives, hence allowing them "political monopoly".
I went to 4 petrol stations that were out of stock today and a 5th that had a tanker pull up and a queue of about 20 cars behind it. This wasn't an issue until the media instilled panic in the general population.
There's more than 100k UK HGV license holders who are currently not driving commercial vehicles (ONS stats, I can't find the document unfortunately.)
The haulage industry is ruled by a cabal of wideboys addicted to slave labour. They have the government bent over a barrel and know they don't have to increase salaries or make the working conditions tolerable.
If this is true, what is preventing a British equity company from leasing a few dozen trucks, hiring from said 100k pool and arbitraging against the incredibly low 'slave labour' wages?
Presuming of course the customers want their goods delivered and can tolerate higher trucking costs.
The fact that the "blame Brexit" brigade is currently trying to convince everyone that the solution is to flood the market with cheap Polish drivers again instead of letting wages rise to meet demand. That imposes a pretty big risk on any such strategy. Plus the government stopped doing HGV driving tests so there's a huge backlog and people who want to get into the market can't.
Electric cars already have a lower total cost of ownership due to lower maintenance and fuel costs. By 2027 they are projected to be cheaper to buy than petrol cars if current trends on battery prices hold.
Readit News
>> "Ministers bowed to business pressure on Saturday and announced they would issue temporary visas to 5,000 foreign heavy goods vehicle drivers to help tackle major labour shortages in the logistics industry."
>> "The government move came after panic buying followed BP saying last week that as many as 100 service stations had been disrupted and several forecourts closed because of a shortage of tanker drivers."
>> "Madderson welcomed the government’s plans to ease visa requirements for foreign workers but said the biggest problems were at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, a branch of the Department for Transport, where there was a significant backlog of lorry driver applicants looking to start training. "
It turns out making your economy dependent on migrant workers then shutting them out with no preparation is bad policy.
This is a few months visa, which means come to UK, supply us with goods, make some money and fuck off.
That kind of opportunities are very nice for the youth where you go to some foreign country in the summer work a bit party a lot and tell the experience to everyone for years.
For a grown up to come to UK for a few moths of a skilled job doesn't add up that easily. Truck driving licenses are expensive and are for mature people since they are trusted with very expensive and powerful machinery. Who does exactly goes to a foreign country to do that job? It must be someone who is retired and does it every now and then to make some extra buck or someone who is unhireable on a regular job.
What the people are supposed to do when the 3 months of visa expire? Go back and hunt for a job that they just left? It doesn't make sense unless the money is extremely good and in the UK the money is not good, it's not like the US.
Earlier today I stumbled upon a blog post of a EU truck driver on the reasons why the EU people left UK: https://orynski.eu/20-reasons-why-there-is-shortage-of-drive...
After the Brexit referandum in 2016, EU nationals had the privilege to keep their right indefinitely, with almost no paperwork and cost up until the beginning of 2021 and many did not take the opportunity.
If they recruit people from outside of Europe, how do they plan to make them leave the UK? EU is rich, even Easter Europe is a fine place and nobody will choose to work illegally in the UK(if they wanted that, they could have stayed legally).
People from poorer places will want to stay, that's why you have the Calais issue. People from richer places cannot be paid good enough to come to the UK.
“[EU licence holders cannot] check how many points you have in Britain using DVLA online services, even though they DO put penalty points and other information on your record. That puts them in the worse position when competing for jobs with UK licence holders, as many companies, third party licence check services or insurance companies simply won’t bother with checking the record of the UE licence holder, as it is simply too complicated. Of course, you can solve this problem by exchanging your EU licence for a British one (which, to drive trucks, you have to do after a maximum of five years, or when you hit 45 years, whichever is later), but with Brexit, many drivers – younger, or those who just wanted to come here for a short period of time – are not willing to do it now, as while EU licence is still valid in Britain, British licences are not valid in the UE any more, which means that they would need to obtain International Driving Licence to go for holidays to their own country, and if they decide to look for a job back in the EU, they cannot even start until they exchange their British licence back.”
The amount of applications by EU nationals to remain in the UK exceeded the UK government's recorded total number of EU citizens residing in the country by two million (5.7 million vs 3.7 million, respectively), which raises other questions about what went wrong with the former statistic
>If they recruit people from outside of Europe, how do they plan to make them leave the UK? EU is rich, even Easter Europe is a fine place and nobody will choose to work illegally in the UK(if they wanted that, they could have stayed legally).
Unless things have changed significantly between now and ten years ago (when I knew a handful of people who drove HGVs) many of the jobs even then were organised by recruitment agencies on temporary contacts. I don't see why now it'll be any different given that the wage pressure is there to pay them well.
My father (retired) used to work for a logistics company, he was one of those who organized the deliveries (get new clients, write down proposals, compute costs, get in touch with border admins to clarify requirements/documents/approvals, etc..., all that admin&logistical stuff to have ultimately literally anything delivered from A to B).
Already at that time (~15 years ago) it was an extremely competitive business with very low earning margins and high risks (e.g. all kind of delivery delays as mentioned in the article, damages to the goods while driving or un/loading them or due to temperature/water, thieves, accidents, receiving company not being able to pay for the goods, strikes/events/whatever impacting the ETA of the delivery, etc...). I don't want to think what it has become now.
My father "lived that life" and he kind of liked it (a lot of personal responsability, had wide improvisation margins, etc), but once, on a particularily bad day, he told me directly "don't become a truck driver - it's already now a bad job and it will become worse".
He said that because the whole "poetic" side of being a truck driver (travel through many nations in Europe therefore being able to see a lot of stuff, deal with different kinds of people, be independent, etc...) got replaced by very strict delivery/pickup deadlines & monitoring & regulations - I DEFINITELY DO NOT WANT TO SAY that that's bad is general (e.g. I do love regulations about sleep time & truck maintenance, and as a company owner I would definitely like to know where my trucks are located, and deliveries/pickups are supposed to be done on time) but what I want to say is that their combination and the level of "how strict they are" can become toxic. The limits are "grey".
Nowadays truck drivers can get as stressed as a stock exchange broker but get a fraction of such a salary and in general their lives are very hard (thinking about family & living conditions while being on the road, which is most of the time). I guess that you must be born for that kind of profession + you need a lot of luck to land an "ok"-job in that area.
Concerning the Brexit & related extra truck driver visas I personally don't see that having a big impact on the current situation: admin effort does not change, risk (the articles reports about Calais - that's really a horrible situation) is still very real, in general it's just more reliable and less risky to deal with stuff in the EU (and Schengen) even if the profits are potentially not great.
Personally I think that there are other factors in play currently in this whole story (e.g. the Covid pandemic, the Suez-canal blockade, the container shortages, ...):
during the previous months we had in Switzerland because of all that several delays about buying all kind of stuff (never seen anything like that during the last 35 years - e.g. no plastic forks available, hehe), now things are slowly getting back to normal but retail delivery services have increased their prices, e.g. I'm changing flat right now and I have to pay ~150$ extra (each) to have my new bed & couch delivered to my flat (assembling is extra), which is as well for a swiss person not cheap and I think that in the past the same was priced max 50-100$ (or even included in the selling price especially for the couch) => I assume that the same happened as well in general to bigger truck shipments (e.g. from the manufacturers to the retail vendors), therefore I assume that e.g. Switzerland (for sure as well partially DE, FR, NL, ...) is basically "stealing" truck shipment capacity because it's just more remunerative (UK people are in my opinion more "picky" then others) and less risky => this makes the extra visas issued by the UK become just some background noise and that won't change unless the remunerations are increased.
Why on earth would these foreign drivers that could easily work on a permanent basis in Europe come to the UK on a temporary visum? Or are they now also going to pay them a lot more than other places? I'm which case... Kind of ironic that this whole brexit thing was started over keeping immigrants out, not about begging them to please come and save you for a lot more money?
I'm completely in agreement with you though. Without Brexit I don't think it would be anywhere near this bad (however utterly irrational it may be).
There were some articles about structural shortages, like the situation is not ideal and in 5 years it would get worse kind of articles.
Any links demonstrating that market shelves are empty and fuel cannot be delivered to the gas stations across EU?
We're also having trouble finding drivers here in the US, but we're also ground zero for the app delivery gig thing and that's probably giving the worse-paid truck drivers options. I know there's been an explosion of app delivery services across Europe. Could that be a contributing factor?
I don't really care for Brexit but its interesting how there have also been shortages of items at supermarkets in places that the same logic can't be applied. None for fuel though. But it's not always as clean cut.
This is news to people in Poland, unless he was talking about March 2020.
What's been even worse policy is to have closed down so many train lines over the years, so now all of our roads are full of lorries 24/7. Thanks to the Beeching cuts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts
The solution is not to import cheap labour to drive trucks, but to rebuild our railways, and use them for freight (feel free to use cheap foreign labour in this case). Fortunately the current government has agreed upon such things as:
https://www.theplanner.co.uk/news/northampton-rail-freight-n...
HS2 is also still in the works (but scaled back).
What they are fundamentally incapable of doing is thinking and planning ahead beyond that cycle. Which is fine, so far, as they are greatly aided by their friends in the media, Britain's antiquated "democratic" FPTP system, and by the deep unblinking gullibility of their core voter.
Basic functioning of the economy and of supply chains is an objective public good.
The government that hasn't been in power for 11 years now. This country is really not in a good place.
And all those figures included people that answered "somewhat" instead of full blame. Which may not be crazy because realistically all previous governments could "somewhat" have a blame in the state of things after their term.
(And that's arguably rational behaviour, if you interpret the opinion poll question as saying "would you like to help give the media a stick to beat X with?")
Dead Comment
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-58690136
I heard on the news Costco was limiting again. Every person had tp in their cart.
Every other store stock is fine.
(I bet a Costco MBA thought this would be a great way to sell more? Let's create an artificial scarcity problem? Anything to increase head count!"
Dead Comment
https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/
(It would be funny if it weren't so sad - looking forward to leaving the UK at this rate, really).
Dead Comment
The haulage industry is ruled by a cabal of wideboys addicted to slave labour. They have the government bent over a barrel and know they don't have to increase salaries or make the working conditions tolerable.
Presuming of course the customers want their goods delivered and can tolerate higher trucking costs.
If I go on eBay, a Nissan leaf is still about double the price of a much more practical ford fiesta of a similar vintage.