The driver problem is not a recruitment problem

The RHA's figure has not moved and it still lands hard: the UK needs 60,000 new HGV drivers a year, every year, for the next five years, just to stand still. We led issue 11 with it, and with the operators now building their own driver pipelines because waiting for the market to supply them has stopped being a plan.

But 60,000 a year is not a recruitment target. It is an arithmetic statement about churn. And if you read it as a hiring problem, the only lever you have is money, in a market where everyone else has the same lever and is pulling it.

The more useful reading is that 60,000 is what you need to replace the drivers leaving. Which makes retention the cheaper half of the problem, and the half most operators have not costed.

The number nobody wants to discuss

In the same issue we reported Logistics UK's finding that 88 per cent of drivers are overweight or obese.

That statistic tends to get handled awkwardly, either ignored as none of the employer's business or turned into a wellbeing poster nobody reads. Both responses miss what it actually is, which is a workforce sustainability figure.

Driver medicals are a licensing requirement. Conditions associated with obesity - sleep apnoea foremost among them, along with hypertension and type 2 diabetes - are among the most common reasons a driver fails or is restricted at medical. An 88 per cent figure is not a health campaign statistic. It is a forecast of unplanned licence loss in a workforce you are already struggling to replace.

The operational read is straightforward. Some proportion of your current drivers will leave the profession for medical reasons before they intended to. That proportion is influenced by conditions you partly control: shift patterns, break facilities, what food is available at the sites they run to, whether the cab is set up for someone who spends nine hours in it.

What the equipment stories are really about

Two items we ran this summer look like product news and are actually retention news.

MAN's new TGX Truckers' Edition, covered in issue 7, is a cab specification aimed squarely at driver comfort. Our conversation with Kevin Walker at Modul-System in issue 5 covered vehicle racking and the working environment inside a van.

Neither is a wellbeing initiative. Both are recognitions that the vehicle is the workplace, and that the workplace is one of the few variables an operator controls completely. A driver choosing between two employers offering similar money is choosing between two cabs.

This is not sentimentality. Cab specification is a capital decision with a retention return, and almost nobody models it that way.

The measurement problem

The third strand is behavioural. Chevin adding Lightfoot driver scoring to FleetWave, from issue 11, brings driver behaviour data alongside cost and maintenance data. Our issue 7 piece on real-time driver-to-dispatch communication covers the other half - the daily experience of being managed.

Behaviour scoring cuts both ways and it is worth being honest about it. Used well, it identifies the training that prevents an incident and the driver quietly struggling. Used badly, it is a league table that tells experienced drivers their employer trusts a telematics box more than their judgement, and experienced drivers in a shortage market have options.

The difference is entirely in how the scores are used, and that is a management decision rather than a software one. If the first conversation a driver has about their score is disciplinary, the tool has cost you more than it saved.

Personal conveyance, and why it matters more than it looks

We covered the personal conveyance rules fleets cannot ignore back in issue 2. It reads like a compliance item. It is also a trust item.

Rules governing when a driver may use a vehicle for private travel are, from the driver's side, rules about the boundary between work and life in a job where that boundary is already thin. Operators who apply them clearly and consistently have fewer disputes. Operators who apply them by exception and by favour build exactly the resentment that shows up in an exit interview.

The practical version

If you cannot recruit your way out, four things are within reach.

Cost your churn properly. Recruitment fee, training, licence checks, the productivity gap while someone learns the routes, the overtime covering the vacancy. Most operators carry this as a series of small unremarkable costs and have never seen the total. Once you have it, retention spending stops needing to be justified.

Treat medicals as a forecast, not an event. Know when every driver's next medical falls due. Know your historic fail and restriction rate. That is a workforce plan.

Specify the cab as a retention asset. The seat, the bunk, the climate control, the racking. It is on the same invoice as the vehicle and it is the thing your driver experiences every day for four years.

Decide what your behaviour data is for before you switch it on. Coaching or enforcement. Drivers will work out which within a fortnight regardless of what the policy document says.

None of this fills 60,000 vacancies. It changes how many of them you personally have to fill.