As the so-called fuel crisis continued, the government has put the army on standby to deliver petrol and is recruiting foreign workers while critics blame Brexit. However, former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith has blamed the coronavirus lockdown for slowing the processing of drivers’ licences and long-term planning failures by haulier firms and government.
It was announced on Tuesday that army tankers and drivers have been put on standby to deliver diesel and petrol to station forecourts after a fourth day of shortages and closures sparked by panic buying. Unions and medical associations fear that teachers, nurses, doctors, and other essential workers will not be able to get to work.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s government reportedly is responding to the shortage of drivers by issuing thousands of temporary visas to foreign workers, with the Labour shadow chancellor and others claiming that Brexit was in part to blame because the UK ended unlimited free movement with the continent. Olaf Scholz, the likely successor to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, appeared to be gloating over the shortage, saying: “The free movement of labour is part of the European Union, and we worked very hard to convince the British not to leave the union.”
Responding to the situation, former Conservative Party leader Sir Iain Duncan Smith cut through the narrative the UK is in an apparent post-Brexit crisis, explaining the situation is more complex and caused by years of bad planning.
Speaking to talkRADIO’s Julia Hartley-Brewer on Tuesday, Sir Iain appeared to lay some blame for the public’s rush on petrol on the government’s failure to adequately downplay any sense of panic in the first place.
“It’s always good just to play everything down dramatically,” he said, continuing in a defence of the public and their legitimate concerns: “There isn’t a shortage of fuel at the depots. We know that as a fact. Petrol stations under normal circumstances would be fine. What’s happened is that people do panic over petrol because people need to get to work.”
He also criticised successive governments of the last 20 years constantly calling on the military at times of alleged emergency, saying it “does reflect badly on our national civil institutions that we’ve got this so badly wrong”.
The former party leader said this morning that usually, such panic buying tends to peak and fall away, with Transport Secretary Grant Shapps saying today that there were “tentative signs of stabilisation” at the petrol forecourts.
Last week, Mr Shapps denied claims that Brexit had caused the shortage of drivers in the UK, pointing out that since leaving the EU, the UK has been able to change the law on how driving tests operate, increasing capacity for availability. Both the transport secretary and Mr Duncan Smith also slammed suggestions that the problem would be solved if the UK still abided by the EU’s free movement of people rules.
“All over Europe, there’s a shortage of 400,000 HGV drivers,” Sir Iain said on Tuesday. Despite Mr Scholz’s scolding of Britain for leaving the EU, Germany itself is short between 45,000 and 60,000 heavy good vehicle drivers, while France and Italy are suffering from shortages of around 43,000 and 15,000 respectively.
Mr Duncan Smith went on to blame the UK’s shortage on years of bad planning by government and industry, saying: “We’ve known about a problem in the UK for years. When I was at DWP [Department for Work and Pensions], we had this argument with hauliers: ‘Why don’t you train drivers? Why don’t you make the conditions at work better for them? Make it more attractive for drivers?’ I’ve trained as an HGV driver. I know about the training. It doesn’t have to be as long.
“All of these things could have been done between government and hauliers, but they didn’t do anything. Even in the run up to Brexit, they knew this was going on. So we are now in a situation, bringing in the army when the civil institutions, including business, has absolutely failed in getting any future planning right.”
Part of the government’s emergency reaction to the incident is to train 4,000 more lorry drivers; the Road Hauliers Association claims that the UK is short around 100,000 HGV drivers.
“And Covid has exposed the paucity of that planning,” Sir Iain continued, further criticising the UK’s Driver & Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) for cancelling testing for various forms of transport during the pandemic, calling it “really short-sighted” and saying it “made it worse”.
On Friday, the transport secretary admitted that the DVSA had a backlog of 40,000 lorry drivers waiting to take their tests due to lockdown.
“The truth is we could have seen our way through this with Covid testing… It’s wholly feasible to carry on the training and teaching,” Sir Iain said.
The leading conservative continued: “The problem is this huge lockdown that took place — which continued on and off all the way for the best part of this year — has been devastating and we’re only now beginning to understand just how desperate this lockdown was.
“We must never, ever do this again. Because an economy relies on the basic flow of goods, services, purchases, and all the rest of it as we’re seeing with fuel. If you get this wrong then it’s very difficult to get it right again. This is what we’re seeing now.”
“This is the after-effects of what was a really bad set of decisions to completely lock down in the way that we did,” he added.