I had dinner last night with someone who employs HGV drivers and in his mind the reasons are many and have created a perfect storm - everything we have read about and more.
He has class 1 & 2 drivers but has very few class 1 lorries and those drivers would prefer to drive smaller stuff with him locally than go off - even now - and earn better money.
Brexit, Pandemic, retirements - much of it due to the pandemic, lack of facilities and in these covid times even fewer that they can use, the DVLA and the amount of licenses being held up because civil servants just are not working and the list goes on.
Also every 5 years - take a week off to do a course to learn how to drive the truck you have been driving for years and pay a huge fee on top of a loss of wages just to do that.
The pandemic one way or another - in his mind - is the root cause of most of it because of the knock on effects.

Edited by The Dolphin (03 Oct 2021 8.15am)

And chicken tastes nicer than turkey anyway imo.

Charming theory Hrolf but not working in practice. Your fellow countrymen will not do the work.

And you talk free market but you are the strongest advocate against free movement of labour on this site.

And with your views informed by a Britain for the British angle it is a view that ignores the fact that our empire and ongoing wealth would not have occurred without the influx of fresh blood. It is unarguable that we all have pesky foreign blood coursing through our veins including you.

You"re right Ted, Poland are higher, but I think they are the exception, Germany are a lot better off with a 20 million surplus on our population. If we do get long term higher rates for the working man, thats great, but it wasn"t the aim of these in charge, just happening because of the shortage which they didn"t for see. As for turkey, it"s a must have at christmas, compared to chicken, great cold and makes great soup at the end of the festivities!

That sounds like lines from Johnson's upcoming keynote speech to the Tory Party conference. The trouble is it is so full of holes, it doesn't have a chance of floating. Other than on a lake of Daily Mail readers.

It's cloud-cuckoo-land to imagine we have either a pool of potential British people just waiting for an uplift in pay and conditions to grab these jobs, or that the training resources exist to prepare them if there was.

Any improvement arising from this kind of solution is very long term at best, and uncertain for sure. Eventually they may help, as might a shift to rail, where practical, along with technology.

We though have immediate problems. How do you think they can be solved?

For the avoidance of doubt any comments in response to a previous post are directed to its ideas and not at any, or all, posters personally.

The difference between us and Poland is that they can easily draft in foreign workers from one of the other 26 countries in the EU where the shortage is not so bad. That's what makes our situation worse than theirs. It will take a long time to rebalanced the UK economy and there will be a lot of large bumps in the road. Stock up on pasta, flour, bog roll and firewood. At least middle Englanders can participate in their favourite pastime of moaning for a good few years. The Mogg said it would be 50 years.