01  MANAGING BLIND

You Cannot Fix What You Cannot See

The issues are clear and doing nothing about them is negligent. We have been here before. Five years on from the last shortage, we are slowly heading back. The market is waking up. The definition of madness is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.

In May 2026 the DfT published Road Freight Statistics: 31% vacancies (Q3 2025). 23% missed deliveries (Q4 2025). Driver pay 18% below median. All five months old. In 2021 this market shifted in weeks.

The institutions responsible for managing this market have no line of sight on the problem, no planned work to develop one. A major insurer said the requested evidence was confidential and commercially sensitive. The financial regulator, formally notified, confirmed it hadundertaken no work on fleet-cover access for newly qualified HGV drivers and had no planned work in this area.

The evidence was requested. The answers did not match the scale of the barrier.

This is the current state of oversight: no line of sight on the problem, while the indicators of the next shortage are already visible in existing data.

01  THE DATA LAGS

What We Actually Know, and How Old It Is

Every figure in the debate carries a publication lag. When markets shift in weeks, the age of the number matters as much as the number.

None describes today. No live dashboard. No real-time vacancy tracker. No employment outcome data. No driver availability register. Quarterly surveys cannot track a market that moves in weeks.

That is the state of the infrastructure.

03  WHAT HAS NEVER BEEN MEASURED

The Questions Nobody Can Answer

THE PRE-ASSESSMENT GAP: Who Gets Selected to Train in the First Place?

The safety problem is not inexperience. It is candidate selection. Before training begins, the sector has no standardised data on psychological readiness, emotional stability, learning capability, stress tolerance, or motivation quality.

These directly predict retention, performance, and safety outcomes. Better pre-assessment = better candidate selection = safer outcomes. This can be dealt with quickly.

The questions below are the downstream version of that same gap. We do not know who is entering training, how they were assessed, whetherthey entered paid work, whether they stayed, what damaged their health, or what incident data followed them into live operations. Without the starting point, the outcome data has nothing to attach itself to.

These are the questions on which every policy decision, funding argument and workforce strategy ultimately rests. Their absence is not anoversight. It is the result of an infrastructure that was never built to answer them. The six systems required are set out in Section 05.

04  CASE STUDY: THE TWO-YEAR CONVENTION

The Challenge Nobody Answered Properly

Before this report was written, the question was put directly to multiple insurers, the FCA and the Department for Transport.

If newly qualified HGV drivers are being restricted from fleet cover because they are too risky, then the sector needs to see the evidence. Not opinion. Not underwriting tradition. Not "this is how it has always been done". Evidence.

QUESTION PUT TO INSURERS

Will you provide the actuarial basis for the two-year threshold as it applies to newly qualified HGV drivers? If that basis does not exist in published form, will you commit to collecting and publishing NQD-specific HGV claims data?

That matters because the two-year convention is not a small technical detail. It shapes who gets hired, who gets excluded, who carries the cost, and whether a newly qualified driver can turn a licence into a career. If the evidence exists, the sector has not seen it. If the evidence does not exist in published form, the sector is being asked to accept a major labour-market barrier on trust.

EXTERNAL RISK SIGNAL: TIME IN ROLE

SambaSafety's 2025 UK Driver Risk Report found peak time-in-role risk at 24-36 months, with the 6-12 and 12-24 month bands below that peak. It does not prove HGV NQD risk on its own, but it underlines the problem: two years' licence holding is a blunt safety line.

The question was asked.

Most of the market stayed silent.

The evidence still was not public.