COVID-19

As a nation, we continue to face the daily challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic; this is a fight that demands a compassionate and committed response to keep ourselves and our loved ones healthy, mitigate workplace challenges, and support our drivers, clients and communities.

Our teams and our drivers have been working tirelessly through the Lockdown to respond to these challenges. The haulage industry has suffered enormous disruption, but this has not been evenly distributed across all sectors. The supermarket companies and grocery suppliers have been operating at maximum capacity, home delivery is in overdrive, while medical and PPE supplies have been top priority. Unfortunately, the other half our clients in the catering, events and service businesses, manufacturing and construction, have remained inactive for much of the Lockdown period.

As the landscape changes and as we emerge from Lockdown, many of our clients are starting to become operational again and are beginning to distribute the large stockpiles that have built up through the Lockdown. Thankfully, we’ve seen a recent spike in activity along with an associated increase in demand for temporary driver cover – at long last, we’re getting “back to business”.

But what’s the bigger picture? We’ve been investigating how the Lockdown has so far affected our industry and have produced a new Report, which is essentially a “Road Map”,  to provide a clearer understanding of how COVID-19 has affected and will continue to affect this sector for many years to come. This report evolved from what was initially an exercise to get our own minds around how COVID-19 would affect our clients and our business as a supplier of temporary professional delivery drivers to the Haulage Sector. With the enormous amount of information available, some of it contradictory or offering conflicting opinions, we couldn’t “see the wood for the trees”. So we set out to try to distil it down into a set of easily understandable messages and to predict what the post-COVID-19 world might look like, all based on a clear logic. Importantly, we’ve also taken a look into the future, beyond 2021, examining all the other challenges we may face and the opportunities that await us in the coming decade.

Our Updated COVID-19 report is available to download here

Previous versions of our report

Our Report COVID-19 & Its Impact on the UK Haulage Sector is structured into 3 sections:

SECTION 1: Economic Crisis, Recession & Recovery Scenarios

We explore the current COVID-19 Pandemic and the consequent social and economic crisis. We look at how this is likely to evolve over time and we develop a number of possible recovery scenarios.

SECTION 2: The Effects of Recession on the UK Haulage Sector

We look at lessons from the 2008 Great Recession. We interpret how this affected the UK haulage industry and in particular employment numbers within the Transport and Storage Sector then, more granularly, the UK LGV driver workforce.

SECTION 3: What is the Future for the UK Haulage Sector after COVID-19?

In the third part we combine the key conclusions from the previous two sections to predict how the UK Haulage Sector and the LGV driver market will be affected by the COVID-19 Pandemic crisis, the subsequent recession and recovery.

We are in an extremely volatile period, with significant developments occurring daily and a prolific amount of new data regularly being disseminated. This means that this report will need continuous maintenance to keep it current. We nevertheless hope that it will provide a useful basis for understanding our current circumstances, how these are likely to evolve and help hauliers decide what to do now to maximise their chances of survival to eventually come out with increased competitive advantage.

Our Updated COVID-19 report is available to download here