Solving the driver shortage: FTA conference report

Addressing the demographic imbalance in the truck-driving population is the key to easing the driver shortage, the FTA’s Summit, Solving the Driver Crisis, heard.

Volvo Trucks UK & Ireland managing director Arne Knaben highlighted that more than three times as many drivers were retiring from the industry as were entering it.

“Young people don’t want to work with us,” was his bleak summation.

“My UK fleet customers tell me: ‘We pay our drivers too little, but it is a competitive market, and conditions are tough.’”

Compared to other occupations, truck drivers face a host of statutory regulation, he said, but as employers: “We offer jobs where we then put in even more regulations and conditions of our own.

“We have enforcement authorities which are a little too keen,” he said, pointing out that drivers felt they could be disproportionately penalised for minor breaches of very detailed regulations.

However: “We don’t want a situation where operators who abuse the law win commercially. Drivers want safety, security, good working conditions and respect.”

British fleet operators gave their perspective. Dave Rowlands, technical service director of logistics giant Wincanton said his company, which employs 4,000 drivers full-time with a 20 per cent ‘float’ of agency, had started preparing for last Christmas in December 2007, when it began plans for the onset of Driver CPC!

When last year’s peak period arrived, all Wincanton’s drivers had been trained, but 20 per cent more hours than budgeted had had to be delivered because of driver ‘churn’: Mr Rowlands also estimated that two or three per cent of drivers had left because they did not want to do the Driver CPC. The age profile had become unbalanced; the average driver age was almost 50.

Consequently, Wincanton had had to look at revising its age threshold for recruiting. This had previously been set at 25, but the company was now taking on younger drivers and mentoring them. It was also seeking to create its own drivers through a warehouse-to-wheels scheme.

Mr Rowlands described a combination of the end of the automatic entitlement to a C1 7.5-tonne licence, the introduction of the Driver CPC, a recovering economy and even an increasing reluctance among young people to obtain even Category B driving licences, as impacting on driver supply.

If a new generation of drivers were to be attracted to the industry, it needed to provide a better environment for them, including decent facilities for visiting drivers.

“We need to change from signs saying ‘No drivers beyond this point’ to ‘Drivers welcome’.

“Solving the driver shortage will mean a national effort in providing better facilities.”

Geraint Davies, fleet manager of John Raymond Transport, pointed out that the driver shortage was not spread evenly across the country. Recruiting drivers in the company’s south Wales heartland and south-west England was still relatively easy, but was very difficult in the Midlands.

He reported that the company had “just about met” demand for its services transporting FMCG at last year’s Christmas peak, but many drivers were scheduled to retire in the next few years.

For those who thought they could fill the gap with drivers from abroad, he offered the following cautionary words.

“There are few drivers from Eastern Europe now, and a lack of good drivers.”

From the own-account side, Asda Logistics Service vice president Ian Stansfield described how the supermarket had ‘grown its own’ drivers, by paying individuals who already drove 3.5-tonne vans while they achieved their C1 licence for 7.5-tonne trucks.

“Young people won’t become 7.5-tonne drivers, unless they are funded,” he warned.

The changing face of retail – away from large supermarkets and towards online shopping – meant Asda had doubled its fleet of smaller vehicles and now ran 2,000 of them.

“This provides a route to recruit the truck drivers of the future,” he opined.

Asda also ran a Driving Ambition scheme to get warehouse staff driving.

Again, he found the shortage of drivers was not evenly distributed, being more apparent in the Midlands and Lincolnshire, but not in the north-east.

“Our drivers don’t leave,” he said. “But 85 per cent of our 2,600 drivers are over 45, which means that in 10 years’ time I’ve got a problem.”

As the total pool of drivers has declined, employers have increasingly turned to agencies to fill the gaps. Julian Thompson, managing director of 24-7 Staffing Ltd, explained how his agency had set up its own JAUPT-approved training centre to deliver Driver CPC training in 2009, and had since trained over 1,000 drivers – with most doing all their training in the last two years.

He said 24-7 had asked its drivers what they wanted from an agency, and the top three criteria were pay, consistency of hours and an understanding of the complexity of the industry.

To meet client demand for drivers, 24-7 had trimmed its own margins to pay drivers more, spent £25,000 on a local radio campaign to attract new recruits, used social networks to recruit drivers, and contacted drivers already on its database and offered them contracted work at better rates.

Agencies who wanted to attract and retain drivers had to make sure those drivers were respected and increase pay rates – and, consequentially, the rates that were charged to clients, Julian Thompson said.

Also representing the agency side, Jason Richards, the head of Pertemps Driving, said his firm provided training in Driver CPC, forklift truck, road safety and licence acquisition, enjoying an 85 per cent success in the latter. It offered operators full driver negligence cover.

Pertemps-trained drivers were taken beyond the minimum standard needed to pass their tests, he said, and it aimed to have recruited and trained 2020 new drivers by 2020.

“We have to change the cost-driven narrative in the industry,” he pleaded. “We as an industry are going to have to shoulder the costs of training. The shortage of drivers is already forcing the cost of employment up. This has been noticeable in the last 12 months.

“People working in warehouses could be trained as drivers, but that may not be straightforward, as in some RDCs the warehouse staff may come from one agency and the drivers from another.

“We need to integrate training into the workplace. I ask employers to engage with agencies who train drivers as well as provide them.”

A presentation was also made from a political perspective, by Robert Flello, the Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent South, and chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on freight transport.

He outlined a demographic crisis in Britain: we had an ageing workforce, yet there were over a million people aged 16-24 who were not in employment, training or education.

There were four barriers to employment for young people in the freight industry. These were a lack of understanding of logistics among careers advisors; a lack of knowledge of the industry among young people (two-thirds of 14-19 year olds did not know what logistics was); the long hours and poor facilities offered to drivers; and an undiversified workforce that was predominantly white, male and middle-aged.

Those drivers that the industry had were critical of their employers, he reported. Long hours and low wages were the norm, with foreign labour being used to drive wages down.

For many young people, the cost of licence acquisition was an insurmountable barrier; those employers who did offer funded licence acquisition often expected successful candidates to commit to a bond to refund these costs for as long as seven years, which was unacceptable.

It was also far easier for those already in the industry to access training than those outside.

If the industry wanted to be taken seriously by government when appealing for help on this issue than it had to approach government with one voice, or different groups would be played off against each other.

“We need a Royal Commission on transport,” Robert Flello concluded.

His comments were backed by Matt Hague, executive director of telematics provider Microlise, who said that his company’s research among the under-25s indicated that truck driving was seen as being expensive to train for, demanding too many hours for a poor wage and being “not cool.”

Former haulier and FairFuelUK lobbyist Peter Carroll, a special advisor to treasury chief secretary Danny Alexander, said that MPs were largely ignorant of the £9.4 billion contribution that haulage makes to the national economy.

“There is a low level of understanding from MPs, who see road transport as being dangerous polluting juggernauts operated by low-tech and ignorant ‘haulage bosses’,” he said.

“The industry needs to speak with a single voice, find a core message and repeat and repeat it.”

Obtaining insurance for drivers under 25 or without two years’ experience is a significant hurdle to recruitment for the industry. Lewis Murray, general manager of Cornmarket Insurance Services, said that younger drivers generally represented a statistically higher risk.

“Drivers are trained to pass a test, and not trained to drive,” he asserted.

“Insurance companies are currently pulling out of the commercial vehicle field: the cost of claims is hitting them,” he warned.

“The car market is 10 years ahead of commercials in dealing with young drivers,” he said, pointing out that telematics were being used to assess the individual risk posed by young car drivers.

“We need a taskforce of transport associations, Government bodies, operators and insurers to get together and discuss the problem.

“Insurers want to see advanced post-test training, but the insurance industry itself needs a good prod.”