IR35 saw the EE's back off in big numbers, it was a tax fiddle anyway and the govt rightly stopped it.
Pay rates go hand in hand with the number of hours expected, years ago drivers used to get (like everyone else) proper overtime rates, night rates, weekend rates, bank holiday rates, gradually since hundreds of thousands of drivers and other workers from eceonomies with poor pay arrived those rates have been cut.
Instead of daily based OT became based on after your weekly working hours, no not 39 or 40, often 50 before OT cut in and then it might be time and a quarter or 1.5 if you were lucky, but not being daily based they could work someone 13 and 15 hour days for Mon Tue and then give them a 6 hour shift Fri to grab back the OT rate.
When i started on the lorries 12.5 hours was the max, then we joined the EU, got tachographs and to improve safety even more we got to work a 15 hour day.
Drivers packed the job in because they were being take the piss out of pay wise and increasingly being treated like dirt, increasingly demoralised as assumed to be at the level of competence of the worst fool these companies could find cheaply, so companies fitted trackers and some kid that left school lasty year would be straight on the phone asking why you were stopped or off route.
That wasn't enough so they started fitting driver facing cameras, because they employed half wits prepared to work fort peanuts who instead of driving were playing the fool with phones and had serious accidents, but again everyone had to be tarred with the piss poor managers knee jerk reaction.
Retiring drivers? they must be bloody brainy at the RHA, did no one send them an email 5 10 15 years ago letting them know how old the vast majority of lorry drivers were, just shows what they know.
Leaving the EU? bloody right, most working people are fed up to the back teeth with having to lose their wage and living standards because our govts (both hues, there's not a fag paper between them) deliberately allowed millions of people from poorer economies to flood here in numbers that couldn't be coped with (and they lied about the numbers like they always lie about the numbers), damn right we voted to leave, and they don't like it that we did.
The transport industry has no one else to blame but itself for the current situation, employers who offer decent terms and conditions don't have any recruitment issues, they never have and they never will.
The industry wants to resume the race to the bottom with hordes of cheap drivers so existing staff don't ask for decent pay...''there's the door if you don't like it i can drivers ten a penny'', well yes you can, but the one you got might be pissed up and decide to have sleep in the bunk eraly hours in the inside lane of the M1 and a minbus full of happy innocent people on an excursion might pull up behind thinking traffic had stopped and some pillock without a clue in an artic might ram them up the arse stuffing the minibus into the back of the stationary artic (waking our poor chap from his slumber) killing most and maiming the rest of the poor sods in the bus, and yes you might remember this from about 3 years ago because it happened just like that/
