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Boris Johnson waves to reporters on his visit to New York City on September 19, 2021. A week later, he announced that the United Kingdom would grant temporary visas for heavy goods vehicle drivers to alleviate the UK’s truck driver shortage.
The United Kingdom will grant temporary visas to more than 10,000 foreigners to work as truck drivers and in the food industry. The government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on September 25, 2021, that it would allow 5,000 temporary visas for heavy goods vehicle (HGV) drivers, and a further 5,500 for poultry workers through Christmas Eve, December 24.
The move is seen as an attempt to keep Christmas happy in the UK, which has been struggling with a string of shortages, caused partly by the coronavirus pandemic but exacerbated by the UK’s shortage of truck drivers.
The trucking industry estimates the country has a shortage of more than 100,000 drivers. Brexit caused many European truck drivers to leave the country.
Paul Scully, a Member of Parliament who serves as Under-secretary of State for Small Business, Consumers and Labour Markets, told ITV News on September 23 that people in the UK will face a “real concern” about food shortage in the coming months.
“This is going to be a really difficult winter for people,” he said.
Two of the United Kingdom’s biggest business groups, Logistics UK and the British Retail Consortium, have been urging the government to change its visa rules to ease a shortage of HGV drivers.
The move, one of three suggested by Logistics UK, is controversial. The right of foreign drivers to work in England was cut when Britain left the European Union, a major policy of the Johnson government.
Logistics UK has been polite but firm in asking for an exemption for the country’s road haulage sector.
“The government should also review its decision not to grant temporary work visas to HGV drivers from the EU, as such drivers could supplement the domestic HGV workforce in the short-term, while the testing backlog is cleared, and new drivers are trained and become qualified,” David Wells, the chief executive of Logistics UK, said in a letter to Kwasi Kwarteng, Secretary of State at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
The other two steps outlined by UK Logistics include a permanent increase in the Driver and Vehicles Standards Agency’s (DVSA) testing capacity.
This would allow the agency to process the backlog of driver tests placed on hold during the pandemic – which left thousands of aspiring HGV drivers unable to join the workforce.
The other is reforming the National Skills Fund to fund HGV driver training and injecting flexibility into the apprenticeship levy.
For its part, the government had, until the September 25 announcement, rejected the case for providing temporary visas for EU truck drivers, urging instead the development of domestic labour. It also pointed to reforms it had made including plans to streamline the process for new drivers to gain their HGV licence and to increase the number of tests.Gregory Glass in Hong Kong contributed to this report.
Michael Mackey
