£70k to drive an HGV? Sign me up
With vacancies for lorry drivers soaring, Nick Harding sees if he has what it takes
As we pick up speed the cabin bounces up and down. I feel like a rodeo rider
Until this week, the biggest vehicle I’d ever driven was a Ford Transit van, in which I misjudged a gap in traffic and accidentally tore the wing mirror off a passing Toyota. I don’t mention this to HGV instructor Andy Butcher as he shows me the behemoth that I’m about to take control of, a 450 horsepower Mercedes Actros, hitched to a 14m trailer.
Most of us glimpse lorries as we whizz past them on motorways and dual carriageways, or sit impatiently behind them on narrow country roads.
Up close, they are monstrous. It takes a special person to want to tame one, which is perhaps why there is a national shortage of up to 100,000 drivers.
The existing workforce is ageing fast; the average age of a UK driver is 50, and industry body the Road Haulage Association is warning that about a third of the UK’S 380,000 drivers may retire within the next five years. Brexit and Covid didn’t help, as many European drivers returned to their home countries – all of which has led to supply issues at supermarkets, restaurants and pubs, and a warning that there might not be turkeys on supermarket shelves at Christmas.
Indeed, drivers are now at such a premium, there are reports they are being head-hunted in greasy spoon cafes by HGV agents offering them £2,000 signing-on bonuses and day rates that could see them earn up to £70,000-a-year.
Tesco and Waitrose are now offering £50,000-a-year packages for qualified class 1 drivers, while Marks and Spencer is advertising a £5,000 wad for new recruits. For new knights of the road, the carriageways are paved with gold.
And it has never been easier to get behind the wheel, thanks to changes in the law that allow drivers to go straight from a car to an articulated lorry. Whereas previously, under EU regulations, drivers needed to pass a licence in a smaller, rigid vehicle before moving on to the big stuff, now they can literally go from a Fiat 500 to a 44-tonne juggernaut, creating a glut of new learner drivers.
This post-pandemic windfall hasn’t only pricked the ears of the usual suspects, either. Former Flybe pilot Aaron Levanthal lost his job when the airline went bust last March, and signed up as a Tesco HGV driver instead.
He had a Class 1 HGV licence from his time in the Army, so when he “saw the empty shelves in Tesco, I applied for a job as a driver with the supermarket. It was a bit of a culture shock and I had hoped to work as a pilot again, but I soon picked it up.”
His new gig means working “four days on, four days off, doing 12-hour shifts and now driv[ing] fuel tankers for DHL. I earn between £40,000 and £50,000 a year, so the money is better than I was getting at Flybe.”
Stuart Macintyre, 26, from Rochdale, meanwhile, traded a stint as a special constable at Greater Manchester police for a career in driving. He only passed his driving test in 2020 and now has an HGV apprenticeship with Wincanton, a supply chain firm.
Surrey-based EP Training, for whom my instructor works, is now struggling to meet demand for its £2,799 CAT C+E plus Driver CPC (artic) 8-day course, and is fully booked until next year. “I’ve not known it this busy for decades,” says Sean Pargeter, the company’s managing director. “We are getting people retraining from lots of different backgrounds” – including “teachers and older people coming out of retirement”.
One instructor with the company, Dean Court, worked as a tug driver for British Airways until he took redundancy last year.
“Several of my former colleagues from BA have trained as HGV drivers,” he says. “We get people from all walks of life and some that start from scratch.”
As I ascend into the cabin for a spin around Dunsfold Aerodrome, home of BBC’S Top Gear, I don’t know what terrifies me more: the realisation that I’m about to drive a vehicle longer than my house, or the fact that there will soon be up to 50,000 newly qualified drivers in similar beasts criss-crossing UK roads.
As I ease my foot on the accelerator to creep forward, the air throbs. Thankfully, brakes make power-assisted turning and slowing steering and is responsive the trailer and hooked easy. on The the real back, challenge which pivots and turns after the tractor unit at the front. This means that getting onto the carriageway requires several adjustments in situ, and a wider turning circle than a car driver would instinctively take, to stop the trailer cutting across the nearside verge.
Having executed a nervous lefthander onto the main carriageway, palms sweating, instructor of 29 years Butcher suggests that I might like to manoeuvre into my lane, to give oncoming traffic a chance of survival. As we pick up speed, the cabin rocks and rolls and the air-sprung driver’s seat
bounces up and down; I feel like a rodeo rider.
In the late Seventies and Eighties, truckers got good PR from movies like Smokey and the Bandit and Convoy, and my personal favourite, TV series B.J. and the Bear, in which trucker B.J. roamed the US freeways with his best friend Bear, a chimpanzee. What smalltown suburban British child wouldn’t want to be a truck driver back then? They were freewheeling, hirsute heroes, rolling through the wilderness with endangered wildlife riding shotgun in search of the next adventure.
When I mention this to Butcher, he laughs. “I think there was a romanticised idea of what a lorry driver was,” he says.
While decent cabins can have double bunks, microwave ovens, fridges and TVS, the reality of the open road is usually sub-standard service stations, time-critical deliveries and Greggs bakes for dinner. “The
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