My take is that unless hours become ‘family friendly’ or wages double, recruiting and retaining drivers is going to be a constant struggle for employers.
Most builders I talk to work ‘family-friendly’ hours: they either start late or finish early so they can do a school run.
The bleak reality is that you now need 2 adult incomes to run a house and raise a family (or no income at all, and live hand-to-mouth off the state).
With the long hours worked by most drivers, it’s impossible for the driver’s partner to have a full-time job AND look after the children.
There are two solutions for employers: one is to pay drivers £50,000 a year, the other is to take a leaf out of the building trade book and offer ‘family-friendly’ hours.
The former solution would entail putting up prices, and the latter using all those wonderful telematics tools to actually run an efficient, well-planned operation, rather then agonising about why driver A idled his lorry for two minutes before leaving the yard last Tuesday morning.
There’s the challenge…