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Originally Posted by Chris
It doesn’t help that OB prefers to talk in absolutes and has trouble with shades of grey. However, Ballantyne is all over the BBC today blaming covid for interrupting the normal smooth movement of containers around the world and not blaming Brexit at all.
There is of course a difference between “nothing to do with” and “contributing factor”, however within the phrase “contributing factor” is a whole range of meanings. It seems to me that last summer, and up to the last few weeks in fact, it has been the (IMO fairly lazy) cop out to simply name-check Brexit, because plenty of people said this *would* happen and too few journalists have been prepared to actually check if it *is* happening, despite the rather obvious alternative explanation. Time and time again we have seen the figure of 100,000 too few lorry drivers in the UK, but only recently did anyone start actually doing the maths and asking whether it’s fair to name Brexit at, or in fact anywhere near the top, of the list of contributing factors when the Road Haulage Association’s most pessimistic estimate is that only 20% of those vacancies were caused by EU drivers returning home (and in fact, even a proportion of those drivers left because of the pandemic rather than Brexit).
Brexit is clearly a contributing factor in the shortage of lorry drivers we are currently experiencing, however based on the most recent reports it seems quite unreasonable to name it near the top of that list.
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Totally agree. It seems that people will say either Brexit 100% or 0% the cause of the issues where it is somewhere in between. Where the end of freedom of movement does impact things is the resilience to dynamic situations. If there is a Europe wide shortage of drivers, all the countries are basically competing for the same pool of existing drivers for today along with training up drivers for the future. The end of freedom of movement puts the UK at a competitive disadvantage against countries attracting drivers with no restrictions, paperwork, costs,
etc.
Yes, we can outbid other countries purely on pay but that has an impact in inflation if productivity stays the same. Trucks can only carry so much goods so the only options to increase productivity would be to suck up the additional costs or increase productivity through more hours per driver