Cars line up, sometimes for hours, while drivers wait to fill their tanks. The pumps ran out of gas. Fights break out at gas stations. Traffic has fallen to coronavirus lockdown levels as the UK suffers a fuel crisis.
A combination of factors is leading to shortages of fuel – or petrol, as it is called – in the UK.
There have been disruptions in fuel delivery, but it appears that Britons’ desperation for gas is to blame for the current crisis. People are rushing to fill their tanks because they worry that there will be major shortages, straining available supplies. Florian Locker, a senior lecturer in supply chain management at Bayes Business School at City University of London, compared it to the massive hoarding of toilet paper in the US at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic.
“We have potential delays in fuel supplies, among other things,” said Joanna Clifton Sprigg, associate professor of economics at the University of Bath. “But it wouldn’t have been so bad if we hadn’t all of a sudden decided to go to a gas station and fill the tanks of every car we owned to the max.”
Why people were panic buying gas in the first place is a bit more complicated. It is not due to a shortage of fuel or gas at the national level. The UK has enough supply. That’s because there is a shortage of truck drivers capable of delivering them.
Driver scarcity is not just a problem in the UK, it is a global problem, with the commercial trucking industry struggling to recruit new workers to do this extremely demanding job – long hours on the road, and poor infrastructure for sleeping in or getting home. bathroom.
“Working as a truck driver is really hard work,” said Dmitry Grozobinsky, director of consultancy Explantrade. “It’s not very social. It’s not particularly high status. And in many cases, the pay wasn’t very good.” The industry is turning away from the old, and many drivers are retiring, and although the UK is urging experienced drivers to return, Poor conditions and benefits often prevent people from moving away.Add to this the disruptions caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, which has been particularly acute in the UK because the country suspended testing for truck drivers during the lockdown.
The UK trucking industry is also dealing with something nowhere else: Brexit. The United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union has exacerbated the crisis. Or more specifically, the version of Brexit pursued by Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government.
There are some signs that the immediate fuel crisis may soon ease, and the UK government has put its soldiers on standby to transport fuel, as needed. Johnson’s government has proposed a plan to bring in 5,000 foreign truck drivers through short-term temporary visas in a bid to make up the shortfall. But this may not be enough to close the employment gaps plaguing the UK, and Brexit – and the ideas behind Brexit – may make it more difficult to find long-term solutions.
What is the relationship between Brexit and the fuel crisis in the United Kingdom?
The UK fuel crisis is not a crisis created by Brexit. But it is a crisis that has been exacerbated by Britain’s exit from the European Union.
Truck drivers’ pay is not always commensurate with the demanding nature of the work. The job became less attractive to Britons, and so, like many industries, companies sought to fill their ranks with workers from elsewhere. Richer EU countries have often relied on workers from poorer EU member states, and these workers can drive a truck in the UK or Germany and earn much more money than they could in Poland, for example.
According to the UK Office for National Statistics, there are around 16,000 fewer EU nationals working as HGV (heavy goods vehicle) drivers in March 2021, compared to last year. The UK Road Haulage Association (RHA) estimates there is a shortage of 100,000 workers, about 20,000 of them due to a shortage of foreign workers.
The UK’s ability to employ foreign workers worked well while it was still a member of the EU, as one of the bloc’s core principles is the free movement of workers. This means that EU citizens can look for a job or work in another EU country without the need for country-specific work permits and with few other barriers. This made it fairly easy for someone from Bulgaria to get into a car and move to the UK, or elsewhere in the EU, to get a job as a long-distance truck driver.
But this free movement of labor – mainly from new EU members from Central and Eastern Europe to wealthier EU members – has brought a backlash. In the UK, this became a huge ideological driver for the Brexit referendum in 2016. In just over a decade, the number of people born in all other EU countries settling in the UK has risen by around 4%, but that It was accompanied by a perception that the number of people born in all other EU countries settling in the UK rose by around 4%. Among some influx of migrants from central and eastern European Union countries. Later, concerns about refugees from Africa and the Middle East helped motivate voters in the UK and played into greater doubts about EU membership. At times, racist campaigns against immigrants have become a worrying feature of the Brexit vote.
Boris Johnson, then a Brexiteer, promised that leaving the EU would allow the UK to “take back control” of its immigration system. Limiting freedom of movement was a conscious policy choice championed by Johnson and other pro-Brexit leaders as his government negotiated the Brexit deal and post-Brexit relationship with the EU. Once the UK leaves the bloc, it will also leave its single market, which upholds the EU principle of free movement of people (along with goods, services and capital). All of this came into effect at the end of 2020, when the Brexit transition period ended. Therefore, it is now no longer easy for a truck driver from another EU country to come to the UK to live and work.
This is not just about leaving the EU, but also about the specific decisions on immigration and labor that UK leaders took once Brexit gave them the opportunity to set their own policies. This includes plans to limit the number of unskilled workers the UK allows into. “There’s Brexit, in general, and then there’s the Brexit that Boris Johnson has pushed through, which is as close to as extreme as you can get,” said Tanya Beltman, a human rights expert. Professor of History and Migration at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow.
She described it as a problem she “made herself.” “The government could of course have decided to have an immigration system that was flexible enough not to let that happen,” Bultmann said. “But they chose not to.”
More generally, the Brexit deal negotiated with the EU has created more friction between the two partners. This was also a deliberate choice, and added a layer of red tape to the business relationship. It may make it less attractive to be a truck driver in the UK compared to the EU and more difficult for EU truck drivers to make up some of the shortfall that the UK has. “What Brexit means is that the UK no longer has the way that the EU pooled resources and moved things around in order to overcome those problems,” Grozobinski said. “It’s like getting shot in the leg when you’re alone, not when you’re living in a community. The bullet is still there, but you have a lot of resources and ways to be resilient.”
It was also difficult to separate the current rules from the anti-immigration sentiment that accompanied Brexit. People may not want to come to work in the UK as there is a feeling that they are not welcome or will not be able to settle in the UK. This concern may have prompted some truck drivers to leave.
But, according to Elizabeth de Jong, policy director at Logistics UK, the pandemic has made everything worse, as people may have just returned to their home countries during lockdowns. “The thing that has changed because of Brexit is that we are usually able to bring them back, you cannot bring them back or recruit more from the EU,” De Jong said. “We don’t have that option anymore.”
The UK is trying to respond to the shortage, but that may not be enough
Experts stressed that the repercussions of Covid-19 constitute a large part of this chaos. Truck driver training and testing has been temporarily halted during the lockdowns, creating an employment gap that cannot be easily filled – someone wanting to become a truck driver in April 2020 may now have found a new job. The shortage of truck drivers, in the UK and elsewhere, is linked to these larger structural problems in the industry that are not being resolved quickly.
The UK government has tried to downplay the Brexit connection, mostly blaming the pandemic. But panic buying and fights at petrol stations have prompted the UK government to admit that a shortage of foreign workers is contributing to the truck driver problem. Boris Johnson recently announced a plan to extend 5,000 temporary three-month visas for lorry drivers, along with another 5,500,000 for poultry workers (for similar reasons, there is a fear Britons won’t get turkeys for Christmas).
Trucking companies and industry groups have been pressing the UK government to introduce visas for some time to help boost the workforce, especially after delays caused by the pandemic. The UK government resisted, because that would have meant compromising on its positions on immigration after Brexit. Instead, they were largely pushing industries to hire more workers in the UK. The government has modified some training requirements and other regulations related to trucking to help alleviate some of the pressures. But eventually, Johnson’s government decided it needed to expand the pool of workers.
But these additional visas – 5,000 – may not be enough to address the scale of the problem. The government also said this was a “temporary solution” — essentially, an attempt to control the country until the holidays — and officials stressed that any measures would be “strictly time-limited.” However, this shortage of truck drivers represents a much deeper problem, and is likely not time-limited. Setting up a visa program isn’t a great recruitment sale either.
“The fact that it’s temporary and for a very short period of time — just three months — makes it incredibly unattractive for most people,” Bittleman said.
Or as Jakub Pajeka, a truck driver in Poland, told Reuters: “No, thank you, Mr. Prime Minister, I will not take advantage of this opportunity.” “No driver wants to move for three months just to make it easier for Brits to organize their holidays.”
