George McLaughlan

I’ve been in the haulage industry for 60 years, man and boy, and I’ve never seen driver shortages as bad as this.

We’ve got 12 vacant positions at the moment. We normally have two drivers to a truck so there are trucks sitting with no one to drive them.

Temporary visas and making the HGV driving test more straightforward might help but they don’t get to the root of the problem.

It comes back to the fact that we have an ageing demographic in the haulage industry and the work ethic in the country is not what it was.

All the drivers we have just now are coming up to retirement age, and past retirement age, and there’s nobody to replace them.

Brexit hasn’t helped certainly. But this issue goes back a lot longer than Brexit. Thirty years ago there wasn’t any foreign labour here. Trucks were smaller so there were more drivers needed, but the workers were there.

In haulage, it used to be that you learned the trade when you were at school. You’d go out with your father or your uncle and you’d learn the geography.

Over the last 30 years or so that’s been frowned upon. Youngsters are not allowed into this working environment and they’re not learning that work ethic.

They’re being encouraged to go to college and university and they’re running up big student loans.

There needs to be a change in the way we look at this job so haulage is seen as something young people want to do again.

I think people are maybe starting to appreciate how much they’ve relied on the haulage industry without realising it.