In this episode I tell the truth about the haulage industry in the country and the decline in it and just why drivers are leaving it and not coming back, if you think I'm right then please put others right, funny thing it has nothing to do with Brexit and everything to do with the EU, also a heads up on the British Army.
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In this episode I tell the truth about the haulage industry in the country and the decline in it and just why drivers are leaving it and not coming back, if you think I'm right then please put others right, funny thing it has nothing to do with Brexit and everything to do with the EU, also a heads up on the British Army.
Pre-Roll Post-Roll short version
Pre-Roll Post-Roll
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The Tim Heale podcasts, ordinary people's extraordinary stories.
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Welcome to series four of the Tim Heale podcast in this series. It's Tim having to rent and that’s me. So if you enjoy we an a bit of a rant and going on about what's going on in today's society, stay tuned. If not go, or listen to me rent, well, you can always tell me, Welcome to episode seven of Tim Heale rents. Well, we've got somebody to come on about now, the mainstream media over the last couple of days, or the last couple of weeks, I've been harping on about driver shortages.
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Now they, they instilled more fear in sort of population by announcing that petrol, grudges or garages are running out of fuel. And which has sparked, I must say panic by. I've never seen it like this before was out last night and drove, drove past a few carriages. Lots of them were saying that they are empty. They've run out of fuel. And we came past as the, and the queue must have been off a mile long waiting to get into two pumps that were open 24 hours.
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I can't understand why people are going so mad about buying fuel. It's not running out there. Aren't massive shortages in, in the stores and stuff like that. Yes. We've got a shortage of drivers, however, yes. A few places or, or miss a delivery slot or something like that. But let me explain to you how we go into this position of the driver shortages. Many years ago, when I left the army for the first time I did my 11 years service to as a boy and in nine as a man.
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And I did my pre-release course, that was at that time I went and did a class, one driving license along with a class one bus license. So I not only had a heavy goods vehicle, class, one to drive Arctics I could also drive public service vehicles, buses, coaches with trailers or articulated ones. So we've got those two licenses. The first problem I had was getting a job. If you haven't got experience, you can't get a job. You can't get a job until you get some experience.
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I ended up going on the agencies and the agencies were quite good at that time. There was, yeah, there was a lot of work about, and you go into different companies and they've put you on a Bridget or they put you on an Arctic. Depends on where you went. So I got a lot of varied work in the early days of my driving. So for instance, I'd go into somewhere like Tesco's back then they have their own drivers were on about all 25,000 pounds a year on average. And that was for the basic 40 hour week back then. And this is, we're talking about the mid to late eighties, but the Tesco drivers treat the, the agency drivers, like they'd come in on the boatmen of shoe and smell something.
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So from that point of view, we drivers were treated particularly well anyway, announced by other drivers that put you into or went into London, Bricker culvert. They put me in there. First time I went in there, guys showed us out and he used these rolling crying affairs to load enough load to bricks. And they give you one of the oldest motives. You can imagine it was an old Foden. It had a three speed gearbox, but it was actually nine speed gearbox, but we had three positions on it. It was a crash gearbox, and this was a test to see whether you're capable of being able to drive.
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And it was an eight Wheeler and you get your bricks loaded on your strap, them down. And the first thing you got to do is get out in the yard without making a gear boxing, anybody that has this ever driven a crash gear box knows what I mean. If you get the spin wrong, you get no gears grinding. It sounds terrible. And yeah, it's a way of testing new drivers basically. So I haven't got away with that. I was going in an awful lot of experience. I was working in doing fridges. I was doing flatbeds roping and shooting.
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I grew up on the lorries with the old man. So I knew how to rope and sheep. And it didn't take long to once I got a bit of practice at it to get good at it. I did cement lorries. I've done all sorts. I've done containers, I've done tilt work. And then I got a job working for a bloke during the continent. So it was doing a lot of Italy, Spain, Portugal. We had runs up to Sweden and Denmark. We did quite a bit of Germany and yeah, lots of other odd jobs around Europe, bit France, Belgium Holland.
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So it was a lot of group work we used to do Switzerland. And we had a regular one down in Switzerland. We did about that. All work and driving on the continent was so much better, so much easier driving around there. Wasn't so much traffic on the roads today in this country. What's happened over the years is once the, or let let's just go back a bit. W when we used, when I first started going into the content, you used to get loaded on a Friday or Saturday morning, Sunday afternoon, you'd drive down to Dover.
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You'd find your agent, you get your paperwork. Then you go, what they call, get on the stairs to go to the customs, to get your paperwork stamped. You go through, you get your ticket to get onto the ferry. And this was all on a Sunday afternoon. And it was a, it was a bit of a game. You got to meet all the loads of drivers that are going out, doing the work. And that's times all in the mid to late eighties, UK hauliers were doing an awful lot of continental work from, from the UK into Europe and back out again. Although the system was, you still had to do customs work and stuff like that.
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And when you got down in spaces like Spain and Portugal or Italy, you had half going to a TIR park, you'd find an agent. They would go off and do the paperwork with the customs to get your load cleared. And if you were sat any for any more than a day or two, the reason that you were sad is because the peoples whose load it was weren't paying the VAT they were using. You basically as storage was, didn't help your situation because that then had an impact on your reload, but generally worked okay. You spend a day again, cleared customs and VAT paid.
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You go out tip, and then you go and spend a couple of days getting new reloads on back into the, to the agents on a, on a Friday afternoon or Friday morning. And they had clear, clear exit paperwork and away you go back, then you could drive up through France on a Sunday, if you were within 10 hours of your home port. So lots of drivers were coming up on a Sunday. So you got to know the drivers that were on a different routes. And, and there was lots of truck stops that you'd normally go and stop at. So there was one down at, on a national tender own glam you get down to, there was Claude's on the way down to Switzerland, there was Fred's in Madrid.
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There was bogus as lots and lots of trucks up, and they're all geared up to really look after truck drivers. Back in the eighties, nineties, the truck stops in UK were all reasonably good. You had BP set up. A lot of truck stops across the country and, and across Europe as well. There was a big BP truck stopped down in Bordeaux. That was really good. And that mirrored, the, the BP truck stops that were in a rugby and a couple of other places. So although at that time, drivers still were treated particularly fantastic.
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Yes, the money was a little bit better than working in a warehouse, but the hours were a lot longer. It was away for a week at a time. Sometimes if we were doing Sweden, we'd be away for 10, 12 days doing Sweden depends on which route you went out, which route you came in. So the work itself was great. You didn't have somebody chasing it all the time. Where are you on the phone? Did Mo mobile phones were really in their infancy and it wasn't many trucks that had them at the time. Nowadays, I pity the poor drivers nowadays because you've got route planners that haven't got a clue how to plan a route.
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The, the system that I use for planning routes is rubbish because it doesn't take into account the acceleration deceleration of a truck. It doesn't take in to account traffic and they give you almost impossible times time slots for deliveries. So if you've got two or three deliveries on the lights of a Tesco's superstores or the distribution centers, if you're five minutes late for your first delivery, now turn your way. We stand as an impact on you the rest of your day.
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And this is, this is horrendous. This is why a lot of people have actually left the industry because of the way you've been treated. Now being in Europe also, when they opened it up to the Eastern block countries, the lights of particularly Poland, Bulgaria, we had an, a former Yugoslavia. We had a huge influx of foreign drivers. You can't blame them. They were coming in, they were being good pay good money to them because I was no, again, the same as, or, or slightly less than what a UK driver was going to get.
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So they would come in, they were doing the money. They'd be sending it back. They'd be living in the trucks most of the week and stuff like that. So it didn't matter. They, they don't use trucks, ups. They always cook up out of the cab. So from that point of view, they weren't using the facilities. The other thing that was happening was foreign companies. Polls. If you look around on the roads, if you're driving on the motorway, just look at the registrations on trucks, you'll see polls, you'll see Bulgarians, you'll see Hungarians. You'll, you'll see a married of, of Czech Republic, Latvians, Lithuanians, all on our roads.
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They come in now because of Brexit. Yes, they're still coming in. However, they're not allowed to do the <inaudible> work that I were doing. And I'll come onto that in a minute. So you've got a guy coming in, he's got at least a 500 liter tank on his truck. Some of them have got 500 on one side and 300 on the other. And then they got a thousand liter belly tank on a trailer. So they're coming in with maybe 2000 liters of diesel on the truck. So they're not going to be able to drive around all week, maybe two weeks on the same fuel that they bought in.
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So they're not buying fuel in this country. So ended not buying fuel in this country. They're not using the truck stops. So the truck stops and the calf's, the struggling, they're not paying any road tax or UK truck pays before it turns the wheel. So you've got the cost of a truck. You've got the road tax. And at the time it was around about 5,000 pounds a year to tax attracts unit. Then you've got the insurance on the truck and it's, it used to be, I don't know what it is now, but it used to be about two and a half thousand pounds a year, just for truck insurance.
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Then you also need goods in transit insurance, which he said, another used to be back two and a half thousand pounds. I guess all these costs have gone up. Now, this is before you moved to truck, then you've got the maintenance costs on the trucks, and you're looking at least five or 6,000 to run a 44 ton tractor unit three a year. Then you've got a cost of a trailer on top of that. These guys that are coming in from Europe, don't have the same amount of costs that we have. So they're undercutting us all the time. And this has been going on for the last 30 years.
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The situation that we now in has come to bite us in the ass over the years because of the way drivers have been treated, the way that the facilities have been degraded, the transport classes are closed. The truck stops are closed. There were very few places where you can park a truck up. Nowadays, if you drive down the road, most delay buys at nighttime are taken up by foreign trucks parked up because they don't use the truck stops or they're parts up at a motorway services. And emote I services are taken absolute liberties with, for parking.
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You're looking at something from 25 to 40 pounds a night to park a truck on a motorway services. Look at the price of fuel at the motorway services. It's on average 10 to 15 Pence, more per liter than it is off the motorways. And then you've got an, a tolls. You look at the, the toll for a truck guy and say over the Humber bridge to save that sort of 15, 20 mile drive round at the Humber for a rigid, it used to be 16 pounds. One way, just to go over that bridge.
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I don't know what it is now. It must've gone up going through the Dartford. Crossing is more expensive for the truck. All these costs are hitting the industry. So from looking at it over the last 30 odd years, the transport industry has been declining. The way drivers are treated has been horrendous. And that's one of the main reasons that people particularly like myself have gotten out in the industry. The average age of a UK lorry driver at the moment is somewhere around about 50 to 55.
2 (17m 27s):
There was a statistic shown the other day that 1% of UK drivers, this is heavy goods. Drivers are under 25, 1% under 25. The industry is not attracting people into it. It's no longer a glamorous industry. The pressures that are put on professional drivers, professional, heavy goods drivers is immense. Nowadays. The issues you've got is the amount of traffics on the roads, the constant holdups, the constant on the phone.
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Boy, the, the, the bosses, where are you? Why haven't you got sort of delivery. You get to the delivery light, you're turned away. Then you've got the rest of your days mucked up. So this is why the transport industry has been suffering. And it's been leaking drivers for the last 50 years because people aren't getting a right terms and conditions. They're not getting a decent wage when I was doing it. If we got seven pound 58 pound an hour for a 60 hour week, we were doing quite well.
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Nowadays, it's gone up a bit. I think now we're on about, I was talking to a mate he's on about roughly 16, 17 pounds an hour for doing that 40 60 hour week. If you were an early turn, you, you getting up at four o'clock in the morning, you turn into work and out in the yard, five, six o'clock in the morning. You're not getting back to the yard till four, five o'clock in the afternoon. The following day, it's the same again, you're doing 10, or you're doing anything 10, 12, 14, 16 hours a day Sundays.
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And this is having an effect on not only your health, but your mental wellbeing as well. It's, it's a toll. You try sitting in traffic day in, day out, five days a week, sometimes six days a week, depends on how your hours run, because you're also limited on the hours that you can work. You've got this nowadays ever digital tracker graph, and it recalls every single thing that you're doing with that truck. It recalls the time that you were actually driving. It recalls how you're driving, whether you're driving too fast, too slow, too aggressively.
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It shows how you're breaking, how it shows everything that you're doing with that truck. And all this information is going back. And if you overspeed in, you'll get a fine now fines for truck. Drivers are twice what they are for a car driver. So if you want to have a glamorous life and become a lawyer driver, what's the cost involved with that? Well, back when I did it, it was about two and a half thousand pound to become, to get a class one license. And it normally takes about two, two to three weeks of driving training before you've gone and take a test.
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And then the test is so much more stringent. You have to know a law for a lot more. Now those on top of that, the cost of learning to drive, which I understand has gone up to around about between four and 6,000 pounds to get a class one license. You also need to spend somewhere between 500 and a thousand pounds to get what I call a driver CPC, which is a certificate of professional competence, which according to a lot of people I spoke to is a complete waste of time, is trying to teach people to suck aches.
2 (21m 50s):
And then once you find yourself a job, what's the state of the cabinet. You're driving in. If, if you're going in there somewhere like one of the Maori nationals, Tesco's Morrison's any of the superstores, all their trucks are normally about anything from a brand new to about four or five years old, depends on when they replace them, but you don't get the same trap. So they're not looked after if you're going in as an agency driver, you're always getting to the old rubbish. They're not going to give an agency diver, a decent truck, and that is that's historic.
2 (22m 36s):
And that's just the way life is some firms finding it more difficult to get drivers than others. And it's just down to the way that they treat their drivers. The sand at BP are having problems, getting product to the garages because they haven't gotten the drivers. And that is down to the way that they've treated. Their drivers. Tescos are the same. They are struggling. Again, drivers guys don't want to go and work for these companies because of the way they treat them. So I'm going to wind up this.
2 (23m 16s):
Now. I think I've rambled on long enough, but if, if you don't take away anything other than the way that the terms and conditions of a driver or the facilities that are available to drivers don't has been diminished over the last 30 odd years where we've had foreign trucks coming in and taken up an awful lot of work. And it has been an awful lot of work undercutting. If you go back on no 30 years, there was a lot of UK hauliers around lots of small operators.
2 (23m 57s):
They were taken out by the likes of Eddie Stober. Eddie Stobart came in. And as I understand it, as long as he, he was happy, as long as every load had a profit of at least one pound, he could operate. So he was under cutting an awful lot people, and that's how he grew. And lots of other firms have gone to the wall. Lots of big firms went to the wall because of people like him a few years ago, you'd see an awful lot of Willie bets trucks on the road.
2 (24m 42s):
If you look on the mobile by you, can't miss them. They're normally sort of a bluey color Mercedes-Benz truck with a big yellow trailer with Willie bets on the side and neighbor coming in and I were doing a huge amount of habitat work. And they've all got big fuel tanks on and belly tanks on most of their trailers or used to have. So there's, there's lots of, lots of that that has gone on that has destroyed the haulage industry in this country. So I'll leave that thought with you for now.
2 (25m 23s):
So if you learn about, and people are saying that they've had difficulty getting stuff in the show's rent in Tescos, all of that and queue up to get petrol. And when you get to the front of the queue at a petrol station, you're limited on the amount of petrol that you can put in your car. This is why it's got nothing to do with Brexit. It's got everything to do with us being in the European union and letting them dictate what happens to our transport industry. And there's one other thing that, that people are saying, bring the army in to help out, okay, let's look at what they've done to the army.
2 (26m 11s):
Over the last 50 years when I joined the army back in 1974, the army stood somewhere around about 160,000 guys. A large portion of those were in Germany, and it was great being in the army back then, there was so much you could do over the years. They reduced it down, reduced down because of the cold war finished, blah, blah, blah, blah. They've always used it down. When I left the army, what was it? Four years ago, almost four years ago. Now the army would, should have been down. So 80 2080 2000 on strength and 82,000, I guess probably about half are fit to deploy.
2 (27m 3s):
The army now is being reduced down to, I think they said 66,000. So they're reducing the size of the British army all the time, bringing in all this nice new tech and stuff like that. The Navy's Jenn, a slight increase in personnel because of the new stuff they got. Come in. They've got the two carriers which take a crew of about 1500 to 2000. Then they have, you got the, the, the, the, the destroyers that take a large crew, and then you've got the new frequency coming online. The military is, yes, we are the best in the world at what we do, because we've done decades and decades of being able to do absolute impossible tasks with minimal resources.
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Again, this is something that is going to come and bite us in the ass. Look at it. The particle that has just happened in Afghanistan with the bloody yanks, pulling out the Brits, went to the rest of our NATO allies to ask for a little bit of help, just to put some extra resource in, to cover the yanks. The yanks only had about 3000 troops in now a night, but I were crucial to giving the support. So the Afghan national army, when I would do that support the Afghan national army collapsed, it didn't collapse.
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It didn't have the support. They knew that I was going to get slaughtered because they didn't have the air cover. So for people to go around and say, well, why don't we get the army in 12 pounds? I say, bollocks, let's get the army up to full strength. Again, let's have a decent size army that we can bounce to go and support stuff. When we get national crisis like this, we train, we are the best in the world. We can achieve anything with absolute minimal resources, but we need some sort of resource to start with.
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So that's another big grant, or don't want to pull the air, but less put these people bloody straight. When I say, oh, get the army. Well, whenever something goes wrong, yes. Or get the army in to, to show the civilians how to do proper logistic support, but give the army the support to be able to do it in the first place. If your law, my rent, share it with your friends, let them know what's happening in this country and what's happened. So thank you for listening. Thanks for listening.
2 (30m 5s):
I look forward to the next one. Thank you for listening to my podcasts. If you have enjoyed them and your podcast app allows, please leave a comment and share it with your friends. The reason I got into this podcast malarkey is so I could leave a legacy for my children and my grandchildren in the years to come. So they will know what I did with my life. I wish my grandparents had done the same for me. Unfortunately, they didn't in my latest series on giving people the opportunity to leave their own legacy for their children and families for the future.
2 (30m 48s):
If you have any criticism, positive or negative, and you wish to get in touch with me direct, you can email me at timheale@hotmail.com. That's timheale@hotmail.com. I thank you for your time and thank you for listening.