'Lorry driver shortage threatens Haribo sweets'
German confectionery giant Haribo is struggling to deliver its sweets to shops in the UK because of a shortage of lorry drivers, according to BBC News.
Haribo told BBC News that like many other producers and retailers, it was "experiencing challenges" that were hitting supplies.
The problems affect all Haribo sweets, including Goldbears and Tangfastics. The company said it was "working with partners across the food and drink industry" to address the problem.
The haulage industry has blamed the pandemic and Brexit for thousands of unfilled HGV driver jobs while the government said it had taken action, by increasing HGV driving test capacity and funding apprenticeships, BBC News added.
Kate Shoesmith, deputy chief executive of the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, told the BBC last month that before the pandemic, many lorry drivers in the UK had been nationals of EU countries, particularly Romania and Bulgaria.
They stayed in the UK after the Brexit referendum, but started leaving when coronavirus struck, she said.
"They have either sourced work in their home countries or they feel it's not right to return to the UK, either because of Brexit or the pandemic," she added.
'Failure to produce homegrown drivers'
Last month, the Road Haulage Association (RHA) warned that the UK was confronted with a worsening shortage of truck drivers, bearing out the recent findings of a survey conducted by the International Road Transport union (IRU) which highlighted that a serious lack of drivers is a growing, global phenomenon.
In an interview with Lloyd’s Loading List last month, the RHA's managing director of Policy and Public Affairs, Rod McKenzie, said the truck driver shortage was “a Europe-wide problem but which has reached critical proportions in Britain as we estimate we’ve lost something like 15,000 European drivers since around March. These drivers, many from Eastern Europe, were based in the UK, driving for UK firms, including doing international work, but not exclusively. And they have now left for a variety of reasons - from the reform of the IR35 tax laws to Brexit and these drivers no longer feeling welcome in the UK or having lost their right or status to work here.”
He continued: “We’ve always said that we are about 50,000 drivers short in the UK, that we need 50,000 more drivers to do the jobs that we're required to do. Clearly, adding a further 15,000 to this figure makes an already dramatic situation much worse, especially given our long-standing failure to produce homegrown drivers.”
Meeting with government ministers
Last month, the RHA met with UK government ministers “to highlight the growing peril to UK supply chains from the worsening driver shortage”.
The RHA’s chief executive, Richard Burnett, told Roads Minister Baroness Vere: “The need for action is clear and urgent. We and many others have provided overwhelming evidence that the shortage is getting worse - the situation must be addressed right now.”
Other trade bodies and supply chain companies representing food, retail, manufacturing, and hospitality were also at the meeting.
The RHA added that the government “gave a commitment to continue to look at actions that can be taken to address the issues raised by industry”.
Wake-up call
In a blog post last month, the head of one of UK’s leading fresh fruit and vegetable suppliers claimed that the acute shortage of HGV drivers had become “a crisis of national importance” that was leading to shops lacking stock and “perfectly good, graded and packed fresh produce being dumped or rotting in cold stores.”
Tim O’Malley, group managing director of Nationwide Produce PLC, which last year moved the equivalent of more than 25,000 articulated lorry loads of fresh produce, added: “Supermarket shelves and restaurant plates are going empty. In all my years in fresh produce, I’ve never seen anything like this.”
He said there was no quick fix to the truck driver shortage but that government intervention to change the tax rules and adding drivers to the migrant skilled labour list were possible ‘fast-track’ solutions that could be considered.
“Perhaps empty shelves and plates will be the wake-up call the government needs to deal with this crisis. If not that, perhaps a spike in fresh produce prices as the industry is forced to pass on the huge increase in all labour costs to the consumer. Or perhaps a spike in business failures of fresh produce SMEs.
“It concerns me the amount of our smaller customers who have been on to us asking for help because their hauliers have simply abandoned them.”
Escalation
O’Malley said he had been told by one large haulage firm that the driver shortage was not only affecting the distribution of fresh produce and food but also impacting other product verticals “and that the rate of escalation of this situation is truly staggering”.
He said that in the meantime, all stakeholders needed to co-operate in order to make the best use of the limited capacity available, adding: “Customers will have to be far more flexible on delivery times. We also need to stop hauling fresh air around the country. Full pallets and full loads are what we need in a crisis like this.
“Customers need to work with us to stagger orders and reduce the number of deliveries to ensure full pallets and loads. We also need to see customers being more flexible on date codes to allow direct deliveries from abroad. I’m sure this will eventually lead us all to adopt better practices but for now we need to work together to find a way through this crisis.”
The RHA has also highlighted another source of potential friction and disruption at the border on the horizon - the planned introduction in October of UK import controls on food products, followed by most other imports in January 2022 - which will further challenge the preparedness of European shippers in relation to the post-Brexit trading arrangements.