DOUG Clark (Letters, Craven Herald September 30) castigates the government for the current shortage of HGV drivers and further links the shortage to immigration policy.

It is certainly true that the government must take a share of the blame here, the failure of the DVLA to process about 40,000 licenses when demand for drivers was going through the roof, plus tinkering with the IR35 tax rules which hit self-employed drivers are perhaps the two most obvious examples.

However Mr Clark is on much shakier ground with some of his other points.

With regard to immigration and Brexit, the transport industry's own figures show that 46,000 drivers left the industry between 2016 and 2020 of which just 9000 were EU nationals.

There is also an HGV driver shortage across the EU. Mr Clark states that the road haulage industry has been warning of a shortage of drivers for two years. In fact a parliamentary report from a far back has 2016 highlighted the difficulty the industry was having in attracting new drivers, particularly the fact that only one per cent of new entrants were female!.

There were many reasons for this, drivers pay had not kept up with inflation, poor working conditions including access to toilets, decent facilities for showering etc.

Who wants to spend nights sleeping in a cab, away from family for a salary that in some cases were barely above the minimum wage? So my question to the private haulage industry would be - rather than just warning about the problem, what did you do to address it?

Add in other factors such as the 'just in time' delivery model which is vulnerable to any glitch in the system and EU red tape in the form of the CPD courses that drivers are required to take every few years at their own expense and you had the perfect mix of ingredients for the problem we have now!

Andrew Diggens

Austwick