The numbers are held by the ONS. Around 20,000 drivers have retired in the last two years in the UK. The average age for drivers is 55, 1% of drivers are under 25.
The European Road Freight Transport released a report in 2018 that said Germany had 45,000 vacancies for HGV drivers’ jobs and predicted that would rise by 28,000 a year.
This is the scale the problem of shortages now:
View attachment 27093
124,000 driver shortage in Poland.
Information on shortages across many countries, and it’s a problem going back 15 years:
www.clecat.org
Mainland Europe is experiencing an estimated 400,000 lorry driver shortage as port closures in China during the Covid pandemic have sparked a global supply chain crisis threatening economies.
www.google.co.uk
Also there’s the issue of more than 230,000 HGV licence holders in Britain under the age of 45 who are not actually working in haulage. 25,000 new drivers pass their test every year in Britain. This makes the 15,000 lost due to Brexit seem minimal. As you can see here, we’ve lost 60,000 drivers from our own pool:
View attachment 27094
EU drivers make up around 10.5% of our driver pool. We need to be asking why so many HGV licence holders aren’t driving instead of blaming things that are only minimally to blame.