Government proposals to offer 5,000 foreign lorry drivers visas in an effort to ease UK supply issues have been blasted as ‘too little too late’.
Experts have said there is a shortage of around 100,000 HGV drivers, which will continue to cause various problems, including supply chains in the run up to Christmas.
The Government has U-turned on providing the visas to foreign workers, with a new temporary scheme that will also see 5,500 poultry workers allowed to work in the UK until Christmas Eve.
But it insists that the move is part of a major package of measures trying to solve the crisis – fuelled by a historic shortage of driver which experts long predicted would be worsened by Brexit and Covid.
However, the move on temporary visas for lorry drivers has been widely criticised as inadequate.
The director of the HGV Recruitment Centre Marc Fels told BBC Breakfast: ‘Every additional driver that is coming into the sector at the moment is going to be of benefit.
‘But I feel this is too little, because the numbers coming in, 5,000, is not going to make a very large dent on the 90,000-100,000 that we are perceived to be short.
‘And too late because we have been understanding these problems have been coming as early as April this year, so we are moving into October and only now are the Government coming up with these solutions when this has been an issue since April.’
Rod McKenzie, the managing director of policy and public affairs at the Road Haulage Association warned it did not go far enough.
‘Twelve weeks is an incredibly short period of time if you are working in Poland or somewhere else in Europe,’ he said.
‘They will see an advert tomorrow if they are lucky, they’ll apply for the job, they will need to find somewhere to live in Britain, assuming they get a visa, and then they will have to hand their notice in wherever they are working now.
‘You can work it out that 12 weeks suddenly becomes 10 weeks, becomes eight weeks and then becomes “crikey, is it worth it?”.’
Other business groups also blasted the move, which aims to keep supermarket shelves stocked with turkeys and tackle delivery difficulties at petrol stations.
The intervention came amid scenes of lengthy queues at forecourts and weeks of various shortages.
The British Retail Consortium and the British Chamber of Commerce criticised the measures revealed by Transport Secretary Grant Shapps on Saturday, which were seen by some as a step back from the Government’s previous commitments on Brexit.
Chamber president Baroness McGregor-Smith said consumers and businesses faced ‘another less than happy Christmas’ due to the visa offer being ‘insufficient’.
The Conservative peer said: ‘Even if these short-term opportunities attract the maximum amount of people allowed under the scheme, it will not be enough to address the scale of the problem that has now developed in our supply chains.
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‘This announcement is the equivalent of throwing a thimble of water on a bonfire.’
Andrew Opie, a director at the British Retail Consortium called for visas to be extended to ‘all sectors of the retail industry’.
The relaxation of immigration rules was welcomed by other industry groups, however, with Food and Drink Federation chief Ian Wright calling the measures ‘pragmatic’.
On Sunday morning, Transport Secretary Mr Shapps refused to rule out bringing in the Army to drive fuel tankers.
The minister also asked the public to ‘do their part’ in only refilling their cars when needed, calling the current situation ‘unnecessary’.
Mr Shapps also told Sky News’ Trevor Phillips On Sunday programme: ‘(The package) is not just those visas, which is very short term, it is also the big bottleneck where there are plenty of people who know how to drive a lorry but where they need to get tested or re-tested.’
As well as the visa changes, the Department for Transport (DfT) said it planned to train 4,000 more lorry drivers through both a £10 million investment schemes.
Nearly one million letters will be landing on the doormats of people with HGV licences in the coming days.
The DfT said it recognised that importing foreign labour ‘will not be the long term solution’ to the problem and that it wanted to see investment poured into establishing a robust domestic workforce.
Sir Keir Starmer blamed the Government’s ‘total lack of planning’ for the issue – and hinted that he would issue 100,000 visas to foreign HGV drivers.
He said: ‘We are going to have to do that. We have to issue enough visas to cover the number of drivers that we need.’
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