Five years after the 2021 driver shortage exposed the fragility of Britain’s haulage labour market, the warning signs are appearing again. But this time, according to Marc Fels, founder of Fueler Consulting, the bigger problem is not only the shortage itself. It is that the sector still lacks the basic data infrastructure needed to understand who is entering the market, who is leaving, why deliveries are being missed and whether newly qualified drivers are really the risk they are often assumed to be.
The report, Driving Blind, is the third part of Fueler’s UK HGV driver market analysis series. It follows earlier work on the broken transition from licence acquisition to paid work, and on the insurance restrictions that can prevent newly qualified drivers from getting their first HGV job.
Trans.INFO has previously reported on both issues: the Road Haulage Association’s estimate that the UK needs around 60,000 new HGV drivers a year, and Fueler’s call for insurers to publish the evidence behind the common two-year experience rule.
The latest report broadens the argument. It says the UK has no live dashboard for HGV driver availability, no national employment-outcome tracking for newly qualified drivers, no real-time vacancy index, no national driver health baseline and no sector-wide system for learning from near-misses before they become serious incidents.
Fels argues that this leaves the sector “driving blind” just as labour-market conditions begin to tighten again.
Official data is already months old
The report points to the Department for Transport’s Road Freight Statistics, published in May 2026, which showed a 31% HGV driver vacancy rate in Q3 2025, 23% missed deliveries in Q4 2025 and driver pay 18% below the all-employee median.
However, Fueler notes that the figures were already around five months old when published.
For a market that can shift quickly, the report argues, this is a serious weakness. In 2021, the HGV driver shortage developed at speed and quickly became a national supply-chain issue. Quarterly or delayed figures, Fels argues, are not enough to spot the next shortage before it becomes operationally disruptive.
Other indicators cited in the report include more than 117,000 Driver Qualification Card non-renewals in seven months, only 2,813 young entrants over 12 months, and a decline in the self-employed transport and storage workforce.
Taken together, Fueler says these figures do not prove that a crisis has already arrived. But they do suggest that the opening conditions are again in place: an ageing workforce, weak younger-driver inflow, falling available labour and a system that still cannot reliably convert new licence holders into working drivers.
The missing question: what happens after the test?
One of the central claims in the report is that the UK records parts of the driver journey, but does not connect them.
DVSA records the test pass. DVLA records the licence. HMRC records employment. But no national system links these together to answer a basic workforce question: how many newly qualified HGV drivers are in paid employment 12 months after passing their test?
That matters because the driver shortage debate often focuses on training numbers. Fueler argues that training output alone is the wrong measure if newly qualified drivers then struggle to find work, leave the sector or never become part of the active professional driver pool.
The report calls for a “newly qualified driver journey tracker” to follow the route from test pass to paid driving work. It also proposes a live vacancy tracker, a national platform where newer drivers could be found by employers and agencies, better attribution of missed deliveries, a national driver wellbeing score and near-miss reporting.
Without these systems, the report says, policy and funding decisions are being made without knowing which part of the pipeline has failed.
Read more: Driver retention is no longer just about pay: predictability and work-life balance now lead
Insurance barrier: new data challenges the two-year rule
The most contentious part of the report again concerns insurance.
As Trans.INFO reported in May, Fueler has challenged the UK fleet insurance market to provide the actuarial evidence behind the widespread two-year experience threshold for newly qualified HGV drivers. The argument is not that new drivers carry no risk. Rather, it is that the sector has not seen public evidence proving that two years’ licence holding is the correct line between acceptable and unacceptable risk.
In the latest report, Fueler says a major insurer responded that the requested information was confidential and commercially sensitive. The report also says the Financial Conduct Authority confirmed it had undertaken no work on access to fleet cover for newly qualified HGV drivers and had no planned work in this area.
Fueler argues that this matters because the two-year convention shapes who gets hired, who is excluded and whether a newly qualified driver can turn a licence into a career.
The report also presents a new joint analysis with ADR Network, one of the UK’s largest specialist HGV driving agencies. According to Fueler, the dataset covers 729,209 driver shifts over two years across multiple clients and real operating environments.
The supplied data suggests that drivers with less than two years’ experience are not one uniform risk group. In the table included in the report, over-25 drivers with less than two years’ experience had an incident rate of 0.02%, while under-25 drivers with less than two years’ experience had a rate of 0.32%. Among drivers with more than two years’ experience, the over-50 group showed a higher rate than some less-experienced groups.
The report says this does not remove the need for careful risk management. However, it challenges the idea that experience alone is an adequate proxy for safety.
Fueler’s conclusion is that selection, induction, support, working conditions and ongoing management may matter as much as the length of time a driver has held a licence.
Driver health becomes part of the safety argument
The report also links driver retention and road safety to health data.
Fueler argues that the sector checks the vehicle more systematically than it checks the driver. HGV drivers undergo medical assessment when joining the industry or renewing their licence, but the report says there is no sector-wide baseline for issues such as blood pressure, diabetes, sleep disorders, mental health or health-driven attrition.
This is not presented simply as a welfare issue. The report frames health as part of the same safety system as selection, training, fatigue management and facilities.
It points to existing initiatives including the SHIFT programme, Driving Better Health, DriverWell and MyTruckStop as examples of work already under way to measure or improve driver health, wellbeing and working conditions.
The report’s wider point is that these initiatives show what is possible, but the UK still lacks a national picture of driver health and intention to stay in the profession.
From delayed statistics to live risk signals
Fueler also argues that the gap between fleet-level data and national labour-market data is becoming difficult to justify.
Many operators already use telematics and safety-management systems to identify speeding, harsh braking, fatigue signals and other leading indicators. The report cites examples from commercial fleets where risk-focused systems have helped reduce collisions or accident rates.
The question, according to Fueler, is why fleet operators can identify certain risks in near real time, while national decisions about training, insurance and workforce policy still rely on delayed, fragmented or incomplete datasets.
The report compares the HGV sector with healthcare, aviation, finance and supply-chain visibility systems, arguing that road transport moves most UK goods but lacks the real-time data infrastructure expected in other critical sectors.
A warning before the next shortage
The report stops short of saying that the UK is already back in a 2021-style driver crisis. Its warning is more structural: the sector may be entering another tightening cycle without having built the systems needed to manage it.
The 2021 shortage led to emergency measures, including training funding and recruitment pushes. But Fueler argues that the sector still does not know enough about what happened to those who trained, whether they entered paid work, whether they stayed, or what barriers stopped them.
For operators, the implications are practical. If the workforce continues to age, younger entrants remain weak, DQC non-renewals continue and newly qualified drivers still struggle to access work, the next shortage may arrive with less spare capacity and fewer easy fixes.
For policymakers, Fueler’s message is that another round of training support will not be enough unless it is matched by employment-outcome tracking, insurance transparency, health data and better live market intelligence.
In other words, the next driver shortage may not begin with empty shelves or fuel-station queues. It may begin earlier, in data that nobody is collecting.
