The report, The Broken Transition: UK HGV Driver Market Analysis, says the industry has spent years arguing about training and shortages while ignoring what happens after a candidate qualifies. Its blunt conclusion: the UK does not face “a simple shortage of HGV drivers”, but “a system that cannot reliably convert qualified drivers into working drivers”.
The headline numbers still demand fresh blood. The Road Haulage Association estimates the UK needs 60,000 new drivers a year, and more than 117,000 Driver Qualification Cards went unrenewed in the 12 months to November 2025 — a figure the RHA uses as a proxy for leavers.
The remaining workforce is greying fast:
- 48.7% of active drivers are 50 or over,
- only 1.6% of Driver Qualification Card holders are under 25,
- and the RHA expects around 18,000 retirements every year for the next decade.
And yet the way in has narrowed.
The Bootcamp that almost worked
The HGV Skills Bootcamp, launched in 2021 with £34 million in government funding and a target of 11,000 new drivers, covered medicals, licences, Driver CPC modules, practical tests, and a re-sit. Fueler calls it “the closest the industry had come to a functioning new entrant pathway in a decade”.
But the programme had two very different lives. The first phase drew in career changers and unemployed candidates from outside the industry — many of whom qualified just as freight demand collapsed in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The second phase fared better, when employers used the funding to upskill warehouse and logistics staff already on the payroll. According to CFE Research figures cited in the report, employer co-funded participants finished the course at an 81% rate; unemployed participants managed 49%.
“When executed in the right way, the Skills Bootcamp initiative was transformative for companies who wanted to close their HGV skills gap,” James Clifford, CEO of HGVC/Insite, says in the report. “The right way was to upskill existing employees, not take on newly qualified drivers from outside.”
Translation: training worked when a job was waiting on the other side. When candidates trained on their own and walked into the open market, the wheels came off.
“The crisis of 2021 was not solved. It was interrupted,” the report says.
The Bootcamp has now ended as a national scheme. At the time of writing, only three of England’s 12 mayoral combined authorities had confirmed HGV training funding, leaving a patchier regional system in its place.
The insurance wall
The biggest barrier, the report argues, is not training. It is insurance.
Most fleet policies restrict or load drivers with less than two years’ licence experience. Recruitment agencies face a second hurdle through driver negligence cover, which also varies with age, experience and how recently a driver has been behind the wheel of the relevant class.
The report cites guidance from Clarke Williams Insurance Brokers stating that insurers providing driver negligence cover to recruitment agencies typically expect drivers to have held the relevant licence for at least 2 years and to have driven the vehicle class for at least 180 days in the previous 2 years.
For a freshly qualified Class 1 driver, that is the classic Catch-22. They need experience to be insured. They need to be insured to get the experience.
Fueler reviewed more than 4,600 active HGV listings on Reed and Totaljobs in April 2026 and found that only 10–15% openly welcomed newly qualified drivers. For Class 1 roles, the figure was 5–8%. One advert quoted in the report puts it plainly: “We do not employ inexperienced or newly qualified drivers due to insurance reasons. Must have a minimum of 2 years of experience.”
The view from the other side of the wall is bleaker. One driver forum user is quoted: “They want the experience but how are you meant to gain that if nowhere will give you the chance to start with.”
The report is careful not to lay this only at the door of employers. With average pre-tax margins in road freight put at 1.58%, hiring a newly qualified driver can mean higher insurance costs, higher compliance risk and more supervision at exactly the moment operators are squeezed on cost.
Test passes are not the same as working drivers
Fueler also warns against reading test numbers as proof that the pipeline is healthy. LGV practical tests spiked to 113,960 in 2022–23 during the Bootcamp surge. By 2024–25 they had fallen to 69,633 — a 39% drop. In the first two quarters of 2025–26, 36,236 LGV practical tests produced 22,143 passes.
But pass rates are not entry rates. Some tests are re-sits, some are existing drivers upgrading, and some passes never lead to a commercial HGV job at all.
“The licence is real. The job is not guaranteed,” the report says. “We are financing people into a market that will not hire them.”
And the financing is increasingly personal. The report puts the cost of a Class 1 licence in 2026 at between £2,650 and £5,000, depending on provider, region and re-sits. A £3,500 course paid back over three years can come to nearly £5,000 in total. Fueler argues that turns the maths against the very candidates the industry says it wants — mid-career workers, parents, career changers — who cannot rationally take on debt without a clear route into work.
The vacancies are creeping back
Official Department for Transport data showed 24% of haulage businesses reporting driver vacancies in Q4 2024, down from the 43% peak in Q4 2021 but up from the low point in late 2023. Among those with vacancies, 20% reported missed deliveries because drivers were not available. The next DfT release is not due until April 2027, leaving most of 2025 and 2026 unmeasured.
Other signals point the same way. Logistics UK recorded HGV driver vacancies up 33.9% year on year in Q4 2024. CV-Library reported advertised HGV roles up by as much as 50% between Q1 and Q2 2025. ONS data showed Transport and Storage as one of the few sectors where vacancies rose in late 2025 and early 2026 while most others fell.
The flexible labour pool is also thinning. ONS workforce jobs data show employee jobs in Transport and Storage up by 56,000 between September 2024 and December 2025, while self-employment jobs fell by 63,000. Fueler reads that as larger firms moving formerly self-employed drivers onto PAYE contracts — good for headline employment, less good for the surge capacity operators rely on at peak.
Where the door is still open
It is not all bad news. Fueler argues that newly qualified drivers can be brought in safely and points to food distribution, waste management, and construction-related deliveries as sectors that have consistently kept the door open.
It names Tesco, Aldi, the Co-operative Group, Best Food Logistics, Biffa, Veolia, Suez, FCC Environment, Travis Perkins and Jewson as examples of operators where structured entry, local routes, predictable hours and mentoring help new drivers stack up real-time at-the-wheel experience. The work can be physical, and is not always what experienced drivers want, but it offers what new drivers most need: paid hours, a real route into the wider profession, and an insurer who will say yes.
Who carries the risk?
Fueler’s central charge is that the current system loads too much risk onto the individual. Candidates pay for training, wait for a first chance, and endure employment uncertainty, while the rest of the industry benefits if they eventually make it through.
The report argues that risk should be spread among candidates, employers, government, and insurers — through outcome-based funding, finance repayable only once a driver is employed, employer contributions during employment, and insurer-backed pathways with managed exposure rather than blanket exclusions.
It also wants better data. The UK measures tests, licences and vacancies, but Fueler says nobody is reliably tracking how many newly qualified drivers actually enter employment, how many training places are self-funded rather than employer-funded, how much Bootcamp-era capacity is left, or whether the delivery failures recorded in Q4 2024 have got any better.
“We are, at the moment, driving blind,” the report says. “And a vehicle moving at speed without visibility of what is ahead is not a vehicle in control. It is an accident that has not happened yet.”
Its final line is the one that lands:
“We do not have a shortage of people willing to become drivers. We have a system that makes it irrational to try.”
