Driver shortage is due to Brexit

Colin Bullen’s assertion in your paper this week, that the HGV driver crisis ‘has been long in the making, predating Brexit by decades’ is simply not borne out by the facts.

In 2016, the year of the Brexit Referendum, average driver numbers were actually 1% higher than the number of 316,000, one decade before in 2006. The Office for National Statistics has said that driver numbers fell from 304,000 in 2020 to 235,000 in 2021, that’s a decrease of 69,000 and Logistics UK have said that we are now 90,000 drivers short of where we need to be.

This massive drop in driver numbers has partly been due to the pandemic but can largely be attributed to the mass exodus of drivers caused by Brexit.

Again, his suggestion that

‘the Northern Ireland border is a product of EU intransigence’ and a desire to punish the UK is simply not borne out by the facts.

The Northern Ireland

Protocol, agreed by the Johnson government and the EU, is a special arrangement designed to prevent custom checks along the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. Its aim is to maintain peace and political stability in N. Ireland.

This month, in the spirit of compromise, the EU has now and agreed to sweep aside the majority of custom checks on goods going into Northern Ireland. The major sticking point has remained the govern- ment’s insistence that matters involving

EU law should not be policed by the European Court of Justice in N. Ireland. However, this week it has indicated it would be prepared to accept a limited role for the Court. This would mean an independent arbitration panel be set up to settle disputes and if this fails, then recourse to the Court to interpret narrow matters of EU law, as a last resort. If this is applied to the N. Ireland Protocol, issues such as food safety would be covered by arbitration instead of being immediately escalated to the European Court.

So, if this goes ahead, it’s “three

cheers” for the government dropping its intransigent stance and adopting that European spirit of compromise.

John Cooper