Many UK petrol stations run dry amid panic buying | Hacker News Reader

Many UK petrol stations run dry amid panic buying

ft.com

47 pointssofixa89 comments

Key paragraphs:

>> "Ministers bowed to business pressure on Saturday and announced they would issue temporary visas to 5,000 foreign heavy goods vehicle drivers to help tackle major labour shortages in the logistics industry."

>> "The government move came after panic buying followed BP saying last week that as many as 100 service stations had been disrupted and several forecourts closed because of a shortage of tanker drivers."

>> "Madderson welcomed the government’s plans to ease visa requirements for foreign workers but said the biggest problems were at the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, a branch of the Department for Transport, where there was a significant backlog of lorry driver applicants looking to start training. "

It turns out making your economy dependent on migrant workers then shutting them out with no preparation is bad policy.

Driving a tanker carrying fuel requires additional qualifications over your standard HGV licence so the pool is likely even smaller - this seems to have been glossed over by ministers in the press over the weekend.

They can ignore that as needed. Just like import checks.

> issue temporary visas to 5,000 foreign heavy goods vehicle drivers

Why on earth would these foreign drivers that could easily work on a permanent basis in Europe come to the UK on a temporary visum? Or are they now also going to pay them a lot more than other places? I'm which case... Kind of ironic that this whole brexit thing was started over keeping immigrants out, not about begging them to please come and save you for a lot more money?

There is talk about 50k salaries, which is in programmer salary territory.

That’s more than a lot of UK developers.

I vaguely rememberering that there are half a million people in the UK with HGV licenses. But only half of them are working as drivers. So it really isn't likely to be a supply problem. It seems to me that the demand is simply not consistent enough to generate the required supply.

Or to put it another way, the market is working as markets do.

If people really want HGV drivers then they will have to offer more, and not just money but better working conditions and more secure employment.

The problem is that, it's for a few months only. So it's more like 17K opportunity before tax. Who exactly will leave current job that pays, let's say 25K/year, to make one-off 17K? People who make that amount of money can't really afford having a sabbatical.

I think the idea is to attract back foreign drivers, for example from Eastern Europe who left because of Brexit/Pandemic

Yes but Eastern Europeans also don’t do this as a hobby, they all have regular jobs. Why would they leave a regular job for one-off short term opportunity? The money is better, sure, but not good enough to account for the extra trouble and potential underemployment once the visa expires.

It used to make sense for Eastern Europeans to seek a better career in the UK but a 3 months is not a career.

I’m skeptical. The drivers at Booker (Budgens), a Tesco subsidiary, were offered a 2% raise, which in light of 4% inflation is a pay cut. That suggests some HGV employers are not feeling the pressure:

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/sep/06/lorry-drive...

It would be interesting to see who will answer the call.

This is a few months visa, which means come to UK, supply us with goods, make some money and fuck off.

That kind of opportunities are very nice for the youth where you go to some foreign country in the summer work a bit party a lot and tell the experience to everyone for years.

For a grown up to come to UK for a few moths of a skilled job doesn't add up that easily. Truck driving licenses are expensive and are for mature people since they are trusted with very expensive and powerful machinery. Who does exactly goes to a foreign country to do that job? It must be someone who is retired and does it every now and then to make some extra buck or someone who is unhireable on a regular job.

What the people are supposed to do when the 3 months of visa expire? Go back and hunt for a job that they just left? It doesn't make sense unless the money is extremely good and in the UK the money is not good, it's not like the US.

Earlier today I stumbled upon a blog post of a EU truck driver on the reasons why the EU people left UK: https://orynski.eu/20-reasons-why-there-is-shortage-of-drive...

After the Brexit referandum in 2016, EU nationals had the privilege to keep their right indefinitely, with almost no paperwork and cost up until the beginning of 2021 and many did not take the opportunity.

If they recruit people from outside of Europe, how do they plan to make them leave the UK? EU is rich, even Easter Europe is a fine place and nobody will choose to work illegally in the UK(if they wanted that, they could have stayed legally).

People from poorer places will want to stay, that's why you have the Calais issue. People from richer places cannot be paid good enough to come to the UK.

Problem with retired people is the mandatory health checks and that licenses for commercial transport requires refresh every few years with extra training. So if you aren't in industry you lose it in a few years.

Right, if people are not actively doing it they won't be able to start doing it right away and those who are doing it hardly have any reason to leave and take the temporary opportunity.

IMHO the expected solution would be that the multinational companies who have drivers cruising e.g. from Spain to Poland can use the same drivers to run some UK deliveries as well. They go to a foreign country to do that job all the time, and it doesn't matter much for them if that foreign country is Spain, Sweden or UK.

That was the situation when UK was in the EU. It was actually one of the main arguments against EU, even a fair point because a Polish drivers paid Polish wages were driving in the UK. This is something that other countries like Netherlands also want fixed so that people are paid where they work.

The problem is, Can UK pay the EU companies enough so that they can stop servicing their current EU customers and send their trucks and drivers to the UK for 3 months? What if they can't get their customers back when the 3 months time is over? What if they lose their customers to the competition that did not took the British offer?

> Polish drivers paid Polish wages were driving in the UK

There is a law specifically against that. Basically, if you drive mainly in Belgium, for example, you get paid local wage regardless of where your employer is based.

Maybe it's new or they are gaming the system? I remember reading this among leftist arguments for leaving the EU. They were complaining about foreign companies sending their workers to countries with higher standards when still paying the workers the low salaries.

It's the Posted Workers Directive. They've been revising it recently to make it more watertight: https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=471

Slight issue is that UK is not member of single market anymore with freedom of movement. As such legislation, tolls, permits and so on get increasingly complicated. And even inside EU the cabotage that is transporting cargo inside other country is somewhat limited.

So the expectation is that 5000 visas will be eaten up by EU truckers who occasionally bring their goods to the end destination in the UK? That wouldn't help very much and they would probably not want to issue that kind of multientry visa (on such a small scale) if they want to fix their problem.

Wow. From your link:

“[EU licence holders cannot] check how many points you have in Britain using DVLA online services, even though they DO put penalty points and other information on your record. That puts them in the worse position when competing for jobs with UK licence holders, as many companies, third party licence check services or insurance companies simply won’t bother with checking the record of the UE licence holder, as it is simply too complicated. Of course, you can solve this problem by exchanging your EU licence for a British one (which, to drive trucks, you have to do after a maximum of five years, or when you hit 45 years, whichever is later), but with Brexit, many drivers – younger, or those who just wanted to come here for a short period of time – are not willing to do it now, as while EU licence is still valid in Britain, British licences are not valid in the UE any more, which means that they would need to obtain International Driving Licence to go for holidays to their own country, and if they decide to look for a job back in the EU, they cannot even start until they exchange their British licence back.”

That last bit is not true, UK driving licenses are still valid in the EU.

>After the Brexit referandum in 2016, EU nationals had the privilege to keep their right indefinitely, with almost no paperwork and cost up until the beginning of 2021 and many did not take the opportunity.

The amount of applications by EU nationals to remain in the UK exceeded the UK government's recorded total number of EU citizens residing in the country by two million (5.7 million vs 3.7 million, respectively), which raises other questions about what went wrong with the former statistic

>If they recruit people from outside of Europe, how do they plan to make them leave the UK? EU is rich, even Easter Europe is a fine place and nobody will choose to work illegally in the UK(if they wanted that, they could have stayed legally).

Unless things have changed significantly between now and ten years ago (when I knew a handful of people who drove HGVs) many of the jobs even then were organised by recruitment agencies on temporary contacts. I don't see why now it'll be any different given that the wage pressure is there to pay them well.

Right, EU citizens didn't leave UK they are just hodling until the price hits 100K.

The thing about that kind of jobs is, if you are not working your family is starving. No one is waiting for the wages to increase, they simply work somewhere else(apparently, not UK).

Eastern Europe companies flood the rest of the EU with slave like, very cheap truck drivers that have no choice or see their families starve. They will send some of these and everybody will look away again. I believe to call goes to these companies, not to individuals.

What these companies are going to do when the slave visas expire? Are the customers that they suddenly let down for the temporary job offer be waiting with open arms? For companies, it even makes less sense to abandon business partners for a one-off opportunity.

No need for visas between EU states. You can work wherever you want/must

A bit dramatic, truck drivers get paid really well for Eastern Europe. 2x-3x the average wage nowadays.

> Eastern Europe companies flood the rest of the EU with slave like, very cheap truck drivers that have no choice or see their families starve...

Sorry, downvoted you even if I'm aware of such companies being extremely cheap (open question about ethics of who hires them), but no report in TV nor newspapers that I ever watched/read ever mentioned such strong words like "slave" nor "starve".

As you didn't post any link to potential evidence for your statements (your post style being "matter-of-fact") your post is therefore subjective, which is supposed to be NOK here on HN.

Thanks for pointing this out, I'll try to post less matter-of-fact style in the future. I came here leaving reddit behind, maybe this is the reason, so I should adapt.

I posted no evidence because I thought it's common knowledge.

A slave per definition (wikipedia) is somebody who has no choice, other than to accept the work he/she is told to do, wherever, under whatever conditions and in this case under constant fear of loosing this exploitative employment; in other cases this could involve physical abuse.

Yes, under that definition a lot of occupations could be listed. E.g. foreign meat factory workers, hired to work in Germany under hellish conditions, coming from the eastern European nations.

Slave-like for me is just a political correct way of saying slavery. It's a big shame for the EU. Under the cover of free trade, the western EU nations exploit the eastern citizens, to keep prices for goods low.

Back to the topic.

Poland in specific is known for hiring north Korean slave workers https://www.businessinsider.com/lives-of-north-korea-slaves-... and these business men are not much nicer to their own people.

About eastern European truck drivers in general you can find a lot on the net https://www.vice.com/en/article/ppv3a9/international-lorry-d...

> These drivers from countries like Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Belarus, or Ukraine are often on the road for weeks or even months, and they sit, eat, and sleep on less than three square meters during that time. For many of them, it's the unemployment at home that forces them to drive for any wage—which some carriers will gladly use to their advantage.

I found something on German Tagesschau, which is the official German public news source https://www.tagesschau.de/inland/gesellschaft/lkw-fahrer-arb...

But true I found nothing about polish companies sending out swarms to GB now. Maybe they will, maybe not.

The question was if anybody would sign up for this GB offer. I think no, except someone with no choice. Let's see, maybe it will be a big success story for a few thousand individuals earning a golden nose. I hope so.

Can the voter explain the downvote reason?

Thanks a lot for the link - the article is very long, but it was interesting. I agree with it.

My father (retired) used to work for a logistics company, he was one of those who organized the deliveries (get new clients, write down proposals, compute costs, get in touch with border admins to clarify requirements/documents/approvals, etc..., all that admin&logistical stuff to have ultimately literally anything delivered from A to B).

Already at that time (~15 years ago) it was an extremely competitive business with very low earning margins and high risks (e.g. all kind of delivery delays as mentioned in the article, damages to the goods while driving or un/loading them or due to temperature/water, thieves, accidents, receiving company not being able to pay for the goods, strikes/events/whatever impacting the ETA of the delivery, etc...). I don't want to think what it has become now.

My father "lived that life" and he kind of liked it (a lot of personal responsability, had wide improvisation margins, etc), but once, on a particularily bad day, he told me directly "don't become a truck driver - it's already now a bad job and it will become worse".

He said that because the whole "poetic" side of being a truck driver (travel through many nations in Europe therefore being able to see a lot of stuff, deal with different kinds of people, be independent, etc...) got replaced by very strict delivery/pickup deadlines & monitoring & regulations - I DEFINITELY DO NOT WANT TO SAY that that's bad is general (e.g. I do love regulations about sleep time & truck maintenance, and as a company owner I would definitely like to know where my trucks are located, and deliveries/pickups are supposed to be done on time) but what I want to say is that their combination and the level of "how strict they are" can become toxic. The limits are "grey".

Nowadays truck drivers can get as stressed as a stock exchange broker but get a fraction of such a salary and in general their lives are very hard (thinking about family & living conditions while being on the road, which is most of the time). I guess that you must be born for that kind of profession + you need a lot of luck to land an "ok"-job in that area.

Concerning the Brexit & related extra truck driver visas I personally don't see that having a big impact on the current situation: admin effort does not change, risk (the articles reports about Calais - that's really a horrible situation) is still very real, in general it's just more reliable and less risky to deal with stuff in the EU (and Schengen) even if the profits are potentially not great.

Personally I think that there are other factors in play currently in this whole story (e.g. the Covid pandemic, the Suez-canal blockade, the container shortages, ...):

during the previous months we had in Switzerland because of all that several delays about buying all kind of stuff (never seen anything like that during the last 35 years - e.g. no plastic forks available, hehe), now things are slowly getting back to normal but retail delivery services have increased their prices, e.g. I'm changing flat right now and I have to pay ~150$ extra (each) to have my new bed & couch delivered to my flat (assembling is extra), which is as well for a swiss person not cheap and I think that in the past the same was priced max 50-100$ (or even included in the selling price especially for the couch) => I assume that the same happened as well in general to bigger truck shipments (e.g. from the manufacturers to the retail vendors), therefore I assume that e.g. Switzerland (for sure as well partially DE, FR, NL, ...) is basically "stealing" truck shipment capacity because it's just more remunerative (UK people are in my opinion more "picky" then others) and less risky => this makes the extra visas issued by the UK become just some background noise and that won't change unless the remunerations are increased.

Shapps (our transport secretary) is saying this isn't Brexit related. He told BBC Today: “Not only are there very large and even larger shortages in other EU countries like Poland and Germany, which clearly can’t be to do with Brexit, but actually because of Brexit I’ve been able to change the law and alter the way our driving tests operate in a way I could not have done if we were still part of the EU."

I'm completely in agreement with you though. Without Brexit I don't think it would be anywhere near this bad (however utterly irrational it may be).

There are driver shortages in Australia too, where people over 70 who've retired have to come back to work.

I don't really care for Brexit but its interesting how there have also been shortages of items at supermarkets in places that the same logic can't be applied. None for fuel though. But it's not always as clean cut.

It does provide an interesting A/B opportunity. You have all these countries in one economic union, and one that was in it for a long time, and now there's an opportunity to compare the depth of crises.

We're also having trouble finding drivers here in the US, but we're also ground zero for the app delivery gig thing and that's probably giving the worse-paid truck drivers options. I know there's been an explosion of app delivery services across Europe. Could that be a contributing factor?

Of course there are shortages in jobs with bad working conditions and low pay in other EU countries too - but, due to the continued access to workers from poor EU countries who are willing to do these jobs, these shortages are not nearly as bad as in the UK. So of course it's Brexit related!

Working conditions are way better for drivers in the EU. They have rest stops with restrooms, for instance, so they don’t have to do their business on the roadside. The UK government is just showing how out of touch and incompetent it is if it thinks there will be any takers.

A bigger problem is the horrendous backlog in licence applications at DVLA that means new drivers cannot start working.

Finally, the IR35 tax treatment of many drivers means they would actually lose money by driving.

I am living in Germany and have not heard about any driver shortage here, but have read about the shortage in the UK.

I Googled that a bit and couldn't find any news about the shortages in EU, except for the claim by Shapps.

There were some articles about structural shortages, like the situation is not ideal and in 5 years it would get worse kind of articles.

Any links demonstrating that market shelves are empty and fuel cannot be delivered to the gas stations across EU?

Market shelves empty no, but that's due to panic buying caused by media reports more than actual shortages. As for HGV driver shortages in Europe, here's one discussion from an industry insider:

https://trans.info/en/there-s-a-europe-wide-hgv-driver-short...

The idea it's to do with Brexit is a red herring. There's a certain section of society that tries to blame absolutely everything on Brexit in a kneejerk fashion, regardless of reality. Border rules changed on Jan 1st and problems are hitting now because they're actually mostly driven by lockdown and the damage it did to supply chains. One of those components that lockdowns disrupted was approval of new HGV drivers. There's a backlog of 40,000 HGV driving tests the government just stopped doing during lockdowns. Well, lots of drivers are retiring, so if you throttle the supply at the same time as destroying the goods economy you're going to get a big shortfall. That's inevitable.

Are you sure it’s panic buying? I have been seeing it for weeks now. The gasoline shortage might be panic buying but the other ones have been happening for way too long to be due to sudden increase on demand.

Why Europeans don’t panic? Are they too chill?

Look at charts of road haulage. The drop and rebound due to lockdowns was far larger and more sudden than the 2008 financial crash. There are disruptions and shortages in the USA too. There's definitely been a huge surge in demand (back to normal levels).

As for the rest of Europe, I don't know but I suspect they didn't shut down HGV driver approvals in the same way or didn't do so everywhere. The British government got led into very hard and long lockdowns compared to many countries and did a lot of stupid things. NHS has massive unfixable backlogs too, same cause. You can't shut down "non essential" business for long periods and not have big problems as a consequence.

Edit: why panic fuel buying. Political game playing by lorry bosses, apparently:

"The Road Haulage Association (RHA), which attended a Zoom call hosted by the Cabinet Office to discuss driver shortages, has been accused of prompting the weekend’s panic-buying in order to further its own political agenda.

The RHA has been campaigning for months for cheap foreign labour to be allowed back into the country to make up a shortfall of lorry drivers which it has “massively exaggerated”, sources say.

One senior Government source said that the RHA “owes an apology to the British people” for the weekend chaos."

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2021/09/26/haulage-body...

i.e. the idea Brexit is to blame is sort of half inverted truth: lots of powerful people stand to lose out from increasing wages for the working class and aren't above manipulating the public to try and stop that happening. And it works. Bojo just approved 5000 visas.

See, the benefit of being in a large market is that you have large buffer when something goes bad in one part of it.

That’s definitely a Brexit issue, because of UK being out of the single market the shock in the UK cannot be absorbed by the other countries in the EU.

If Spain did the same mistakes, there would not be shortages in Spain when everything is fine in France. Without any central governmental intervention, the sudden demand would be absorbed naturally through the rest of the EU.

That’s why UK has issues everywhere but not only in, let’s say Leeds. Because UK cities are in the same market, they absorbed sudden demand as a whole up until the whole market dried up.

I agree that shortages are caused by government intervention. In this case both limiting new driver approvals, and also limiting imports of cheap labour. Although I am a supporter of Brexit, it is indeed nonetheless a form of market manipulation like any tariffs or border controls are.

Nonetheless, there is hardly a matter of principle here. The EU imposes very strict tariffs, border controls and various forms of market manipulation within its territory. There is a difference of scale, but not a huge one. The proximate issue here is that the social class of people who stand to lose out from Brexit saw an opportunity to both (a) stiff the workers leading to (b) more money whilst (c) scoring an ideological goal over their opponents, hence telling the press there were going to be imminent huge fuel shortages despite no actual change in the trucking situation ... thus neatly creating the problem they were warning about.

Yes, that's what happens when you are out of the club but still want to use the facilities. It's called not being member of the EU. Welcome to club of not-in-EU. Want to sell stuff to EU? You need to prove that's it's up to the standards since you no longer commit to be aligned to EU standards and that's why you need the paperwork. This is valid not just for selling stuff but for anything that UK diverges from EU.

I guess for the foreseeable future UK will continue to blame all of its problems on EU, like 40 years old dude claiming that it's his parents fault since they didn't let him take dance classes. It's all his parents fault that he tries to meet the ends when living in a rundown neighbourhood instead of being world famous and rich dancer. Damn parents, it's totally not because of partying instead of studying.

What "facilities" and what "club"? The EU is not a club and does not have "facilities" - we're talking about people and governments here.

You seem to be replying to arguments I didn't make. I haven't mentioned selling stuff to the EU anywhere nor does this topic have anything to do with that.

Brexit is excellent because the EU is a terrible political/constitutional project, but that has nothing to do with petrol stations or truckers. Indeed Brexit supporters aren't blaming the EU for this because it'd be a non-sequitur, it's the other way around: people loyal to EU ideology are blaming Brexit for it, without evidence actually and in ways that appear to be quite manipulative (e.g. deliberately lying to provoke a run on petrol then blaming that on Brexit).

BTW the attitude you display here is exactly one of the reasons leaving the EU was so important. I've never once encountered an EU fan who displays a friendly and cooperative attitude, or an understanding of why people voted to leave. It's always immense bitterness, stupid analogies and insults.

The club thing is a metaphor, not even an analogy. Essentially it means, there are different rules for doing things in the EU for people and companies that are from it or from the outside and UK is now from outside and as a result will need to deal with the stuff for outsiders. Why there are different rules? Because within the EU we have agreed on how things should work, with the outsiders we don't have such an agreement therefore they can do whatever they like as long as the stuff that comes to EU or affects EU citizens directly needs to happen according to the standards we decided to.

As a result, this will bring you the opportunity to do your own thing like all the outsiders out there, like produce and eat chlorinated chicken, put asbestos in kids toys if that's your thing but you will be required to prove that you are sending the un-chlorinated ones to EU. That's why you have checks and paperworks at the border, it's not to piss you off. Anything that's happening currently is the logical outcome of Brexit, it's not a conspiracy to make life hard for the British. We love UK and the British culture, that's why we are so sour about this "We are better than the EU" thingy. Seriously, besides some jokes and snarky comments, no one wishes bad things to the British people.

Anyway, so since you left, when do you expect to meet the friendly, cooperative people who don't insult you for expecting unreasonable things?

Again you seem to be responding to arguments nobody is making, or at least not in this thread.

Where has anyone said "Britain is better than the EU"? Nowhere, that I can see.

When did anyone express incomprehension at the existence of border controls? Not here.

Has anyone said they want to put asbestos in children's toys? No, that's some sort of straw man.

>very large and even larger shortages in other EU countries like Poland

This is news to people in Poland, unless he was talking about March 2020.

Bad policy for who though? A lot of blue-collar workers are finding themselves in demand, with higher pay either here already or coming soon.

Bad policy for all of the people who need petrol to drive; for all of the people who work at the (temporarily, thankfully) closed stations; and for anyone who works at businesses that rely on regular petrol supplies.

Basic functioning of the economy and of supply chains is an objective public good.

My point is that there are winners and losers here. It sure would have been convenient for the rest of the UK if they had carried on importing cheap labor, but that wasn’t what the Brexit-voting working classes were thinking about.

The lack of preparation for the demand in licensing and training for those workers is part of the bad policy.

The UK cabinet, comprised of former journalists, media "personalities" and PR industry hacks, only thinks in terms of the 24 hour news cycle: how to deflect blame, rile up their base, or throw dead cats.

What they are fundamentally incapable of doing is thinking and planning ahead beyond that cycle. Which is fine, so far, as they are greatly aided by their friends in the media, Britain's antiquated "democratic" FPTP system, and by the deep unblinking gullibility of their core voter.

> It turns out making your economy dependent on migrant workers then shutting them out with no preparation is bad policy.

What's been even worse policy is to have closed down so many train lines over the years, so now all of our roads are full of lorries 24/7. Thanks to the Beeching cuts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beeching_cuts

The solution is not to import cheap labour to drive trucks, but to rebuild our railways, and use them for freight (feel free to use cheap foreign labour in this case). Fortunately the current government has agreed upon such things as:

https://www.theplanner.co.uk/news/northampton-rail-freight-n...

HS2 is also still in the works (but scaled back).

A recent opinium poll suggests 33% of British adults blame the last labour government.

The government that hasn't been in power for 11 years now. This country is really not in a good place.

Source?

https://twitter.com/OpiniumResearch/status/14420488811650170... - see the final column of the graph

That includes "partly to blame", and notably "the last Labour government" is considered least "partly to blame" of all the options presented.

If you can't read the text of a poll, or if you can read it and it asks binary questions, disregard the poll.

You're quoting the least votes option out of a poll, which is a very misleading way to present the data. Because 68% of British adults blamed Brexit, 70% blamed the current government and 76% blamed Covid (this was the top 3). Followed by several other options and then in the last place with only 33% people blamed the last labour government.

And all those figures included people that answered "somewhat" instead of full blame. Which may not be crazy because realistically all previous governments could "somewhat" have a blame in the state of things after their term.

The point is that it is way more than Lizardman-territory. If I were at the PC I'd have just copied the data out in full but I was going from memory on my phone.

Well yeah, the people who voted for Brexit have to put the blame on something other than Brexit, or else they would have to admit that their decision was wrong...

I think that just tells us that many people treat opinion polls as an opportunity to say what they approve and disapprove of, whatever the actual question being asked is.

(And that's arguably rational behaviour, if you interpret the opinion poll question as saying "would you like to help give the media a stick to beat X with?")

Maybe that's just a proxy vote blaming the Labour party. Which are to blame (at least much more than 33%), because they're not producing a viable alternative to conservatives, hence allowing them "political monopoly".

The only good thing to come out of this is that the BBC have a reporter called “Phil McCann” and they sent him to cover the story:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/business-58690136

For any fans of Karl Pilkington's rockbusters, "Phil McCann" is a source of infinite clues.

I went to 4 petrol stations that were out of stock today and a 5th that had a tanker pull up and a queue of about 20 cars behind it. This wasn't an issue until the media instilled panic in the general population.

Same thing with toilet paper/paper towels ar Costco.

I heard on the news Costco was limiting again. Every person had tp in their cart.

Every other store stock is fine.

(I bet a Costco MBA thought this would be a great way to sell more? Let's create an artificial scarcity problem? Anything to increase head count!"

Compare and contrast with

https://reaction.life/britain-looks-like-brexit/

(It would be funny if it weren't so sad - looking forward to leaving the UK at this rate, really).

There's more than 100k UK HGV license holders who are currently not driving commercial vehicles (ONS stats, I can't find the document unfortunately.)

The haulage industry is ruled by a cabal of wideboys addicted to slave labour. They have the government bent over a barrel and know they don't have to increase salaries or make the working conditions tolerable.

If this is true, what is preventing a British equity company from leasing a few dozen trucks, hiring from said 100k pool and arbitraging against the incredibly low 'slave labour' wages?

Presuming of course the customers want their goods delivered and can tolerate higher trucking costs.

The fact that the "blame Brexit" brigade is currently trying to convince everyone that the solution is to flood the market with cheap Polish drivers again instead of letting wages rise to meet demand. That imposes a pretty big risk on any such strategy. Plus the government stopped doing HGV driving tests so there's a huge backlog and people who want to get into the market can't.

> That imposes a pretty big risk on any such strategy.

Surely long term haulage contracts would deal with that?

The proposal is predicated on existing haulage users not having such contracts, otherwise they couldn't easily switch to the new firms.

Surely those existing long-term contracts would have clauses guaranteeing driver availability* and deliveries?

Which, if this is indeed the problem *, could now be voided?

[Out of curiosity, which drivers were delivering all the fuel a few weeks ago, and where have they gone?]

Nowhere. They're still there. There's been a run on petrol stations caused by misleading press reports, which in turn appear to have been planted by people who run some sort of haulage operators association. There has been no actual overnight change in supply, just an overnight change in demand - one that appears to be artificially created through the media in order to pressure the government to partially undo Brexit by allowing cheap labour back in.

Couldn't find a lick of petrol near Cambridge. Really starting to miss the amber nectar.

I wonder how much this will boost sales of electric cars in the UK? Looking forward to seeing the bump in sales graphs a couple of months from now!

I guess it could do, but electric cars are simply too expensive still.

If I go on eBay, a Nissan leaf is still about double the price of a much more practical ford fiesta of a similar vintage.

Electric cars already have a lower total cost of ownership due to lower maintenance and fuel costs. By 2027 they are projected to be cheaper to buy than petrol cars if current trends on battery prices hold.

Anecdotally, the petrol stations near me ran dry today. Whilst I’m sure this will blow over soon, I can’t help but hope this act as a catalyst for EV adoption here.

IMO the biggest EV issue we have in the UK is that fact that about 2/3 of the country has no off-street parking.

No home charging puts a lot of pressure on expansion of infrastructure before it’s feasible for everyone.

They're still a plaything for the rich for that reason.

I think getting chargers to the street is pretty feasible but I just know it'd get outsourced to some company run by the friend of a minister with no history.

Camden council here in London has put in Siemens/Ubitricity chargers on lampposts. Now it’s hard to find one that isn’t ICE’d by a petrol car because those parking spots are not marked as reserved for EVs like Source London’s. The government is requiring all new construction to have chargers, and parking difficulties are hardly an EV-only problem.

Where are people going to drive to anyway? It’s an island. Sheesh!

Yeah, matey! Oz too! :D

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