On a normal day I arrive at work about 5.30. I clock in, go to the dispatch counter, find my truck, do vehicle checks, and then start my delivery round. There’s quite a bit of physical work involved in delivering to the supermarkets, especially in built-up areas where parking is difficult. Often I’m all over the country.

I complete my round, get back to the depot, do my end-of-route-safety checks, and debrief. I might get another run, depending on how many hours I’m on that day. By the time I’ve done that six days straight I’m exhausted.

The recent driver shortage has made it clear that this work is as hard as it is crucial. My company is trying to push us to the absolute limit of what we’re contracted to do, because they’re struggling – at the same time, the deliveries aren’t as big in terms of volume as we’re used to, because there are problems getting materials into the depots.

Wage negotiations have become easier, but my company is seeing lots of drivers leaving because there’s bigger and better offers out there. In fact we’ve been haemorrhaging drivers since March. Other companies are recognising that they’re in trouble, and they’d rather take the financial pill now than the alternative. One driver who handed his notice in recently had been with the business for fifteen years.

There are some big headline numbers out there in terms of percentage increases for wages, but it’s important to look at what you’ve got to do to achieve those headline figures, especially in terms of the hours you’ve got to work. Most people don’t want to spend nights away sleeping in a cab.

Covid brought the conditions of the work into sharp relief. Every supermarket was a Covid hotspot, and we were going to those stores on a daily basis, and travelling around the country afterwards. We had ways to protect ourselves as best we could, but it was still frightening. Drivers were getting pinged constantly because store workers were getting Covid, and we’d been in close contact with them. We’ve got people at work now who have been recovering from Long Covid for months, and they’re still struggling.

That means the current shortage is only highlighting what HGV drivers have been saying for years: that we’re underpaid, undervalued, not respected. And we’re starting to see what I can only describe as fear in our managers’ faces.

The problem, for HGV drivers, is that everybody wants what’s on the truck. Everything you touch, eat, wear—almost everything you see—has come to you by truck. But no one wants the truck anywhere near them once that’s done. In the food industry, drivers and trucks are seen as a necessary, horrible inconvenience that managers have to tolerate in order to do business. That’s how we’re looked at.

That contributes to a situation where we feel less and less welcome. There’s nowhere to park a truck in London, for example. If you’ve been sitting in traffic making multiple deliveries, where do you go for a break? In the roads out of the city, the laybys are gone. The cafes are gone. There are no facilities for us.

Other countries recognise that without truckers, they don’t eat. They don’t get the nice things in life that they want. We need to recognise that, and the work needs to be rewarded accordingly to encourage people into the industry.

When I first started at my company twelve years ago, the wages were reasonable: I wasn’t living an extravagant lifestyle, but me and my family had everything we needed. Over the years we’ve noticed ourselves dipping more and more into savings, because prices are going up and our salaries haven’t reflected that – they’ve been at inflation or just below. That doesn’t reflect real-world costs.

Sometimes it isn’t even enough to buy fuel to get to work. Most drivers can’t use public transport to commute because our depots are off public transport links, and because our start and finish times would make public transport links unusable anyway. So we’re dependent on cars or motorbikes, and those things aren’t getting cheaper. During the fuel shortage, some of my colleagues weren’t able to get fuel to get to work. They had to take holiday or go unpaid.

If this shortage isn’t resolved, it means the realisation of every politician’s greatest fear. People are three square meals away from a revolution: if they can’t buy food, they’re going to be on the streets. They’re talking about testing and all the rest of it, but the truth is that the money and the respect have got to go up. Making tests available, assuming that enough people even pass, isn’t enough. The government is now saying we need to increase the rate for the job, which is welcome – but drivers like me have been saying that for 30 years.

I’m in my sixties now. The average age among my colleagues is near 55, and there are no youngsters coming in. That’s proof that this crisis has been a long time in the making. The big companies have sleepwalked into this – we’ve said it over and over, and they haven’t listened. The only planning they do is for their next bonus. That’s as far as they look.