HGV Driver Shortage – The Solutions?

The Big Fixes

Apprenticeships

It’s a word, a training programme that has connotations of young people in education. Which is why perhaps it often fails to resonate with many. You can’t rename it (or can you?) to glamorise it further, but let’s face it – they do work. Especially now becoming 8 months on programme instead of 12+. The same content condensed into a shorter time frame – hopefully then not compromising the end quality of driver / employee. For small to medium sized employers you can have up to 95% of the Apprenticeship cost subsidised by the government. For ‘levy payers’ with a wage bill of £3million or more, you’re looking at 100%. Of course there are nuances between these depending on a number of factors, but the case remains that there is still means to heavily subsidise HGV training for companies and individuals who want to fully buy into a quality outcome. Not just a licence and go approach. At the time of writing in November 2025 the training industry specifically is all systems go with HGV Apprenticeships!

HGV Bootcamps – gone forever or could come back?

Many are lobbying for it to return, but will that make a difference? Clearly it’s a big lever, with big costs, yet big outcomes. This one sits well above my paygrade as to how close it is to the labour governments list of priorities, and indeed if it is even on the table. No doubt as mentioned before in my previous blog post they certainly work, so we don’t need to go over that. Nevertheless the last time this lever was first pulled was at the end of 2021 when headline media got involved making bold claims of Christmas not getting delivered, call the Army in etc etc. Therefore I personally think the noise would have to become deafening again from wider industries and everyday people for Bootcamp to return, and not just the current players within it.

Societal change

As an industry we need to focus on making the job more attractive to two main categories in my opinion. Women & Gen Z.

Women –
According to the Office for National Statistics in their latest (2024) numbers there are 34,214,835 women and 32,811,457 men. That’s right, there are more women than men in the UK right at this very moment. Do you know what else – although it is a much smaller sample size which I’ll go into in a minute, they have a higher pass rate than men in LGV tests. Not occasionally, far more often than not. DVSA pass statistics to be found lower down this post. Surely this is a massively underfished pond? I’m sorry to all women at this point for drawing parallels to you, fishing and ponds, but that’s where my C at English language A-level took me. Fact is there are some tremendously talented female drivers out there that would make fantastic employees to any business. Even drawing further back to the HGV training side of things, a lot of our instructional team often comment on the differences in teaching men and women. The biggest differences being the ability to listen to what is being said and acting on it and leaving ego at the door. They tend to appreciate far greater the role of being there as a student and wanting to learn, and that is 100% why I believe even if they did 50,000 more tests to bridge the gender gap – they’d still pass more HGV driving tests than men.

Gen Z –
Oh Gen Z. Poor misunderstood Gen Z. As a Millennial writing this even I feel somewhat removed from the generation below me. Let alone how a Boomer might try to relate to them. Knowing exactly what bins go out on which day vs TikTok dances. It’s a jungle out there. However the simple equation remains that there are more Boomers leaving than Gen Z entering when it comes to the HGV industry. We need this scale to tip and to do that the industry has to change even the basic way we market to our customers. Currently we find a frightening number of unemployed graduates fighting for corporate job roles that are arguably dwindling due to the introduction of AI. Now I’m not saying becoming an HGV driver is the next best thing, but is it a viable job to achieve a good salary in 2025? Absolutely. It could then open you up to the logistics & haulage industry as a whole to carve out a career if that becomes the journey. Social Media and namely TikTok and Instagram are the fishing ponds to advertise to Gen Z (oh you’re back to pond references again I see…) and no I’m not a digital marketing expert, but that’s a fact folks. So when HGV influencers have started taking off and exponentially increasing exposure and awareness of the HGV driving sector, that can only be a good thing to capture young attention. Awareness comes first, followed by action. Many fish to be caught from trendy social media platforms. Can’t believe I just used the word trendy. Anyway, here is an article by a far more talented writer than myself called Lily who came to us earlier in 2025 > https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14479645/average-lorry-driver-wage-graduate-shortage-genz.html

Greater test availability

• Since entering the HGV & PCV training world over 9 years ago now. Wow, that feels mad to write. One of the single pills I’ve found hardest to swallow is test / examiner availability and the related success or struggle that brings to your business.

No examiners = No tests. No tests = No courses. No courses = NO BUSINESS.

You see where I’m going here. To have your business hamstrung by the DVSA / government as to how much work you can actually carry out feels insane to me. Don’t get me wrong, National Driving Centre has often operated on more good than bad and largely lucky with DVSA examiners that happened to be trained to the vocational testing level and live in a radius that is commutable for such tests. However we fully appreciate this is not the case for the vast majority of UK training providers. Having to either travel crazy distances to get to a public test centre or not getting nearly enough allocation at their own customer site, all because there simply aren’t enough examiners being trained to go around. If a member of parliament reads this (Ha!) or even specifically a decision maker at the DVSA (Ha…and….Ha!) do the UK a favour:

1. Pay your examiners more to retain them and entice new ones. You can understand their point of view when they’re testing someone out on road they know could well walk straight into a better paying job than the them after they have just qualified them for that HGV licence…
2. Train more of them. 1 is linked to 2 for obvious reasons, but the fact remains that you can’t rely on calling in the army (Ministry of Defence – MOD) examiners every time things get tough. 
3. Delegated driving examiners anyone? This one is a real cat amongst the pigeons. ‘If the DVSA can’t do it, we will’ kind of mantra. The Police, Fire service, Bus operators and haulage firms can. So….why….can’t….we?

Large Goods Vehicle (LGV) driving tests conducted, passed and pass rates by finicial year [note 1], category [note 2] DRT321C

(https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/driving-test-and-theory-test-data-large-goods-vehicles-lgv)

As you can see from the table above we’re back to less than 2017-2018 levels of testing. If the statistics are accurate from the RHA – we need 60,000 new drivers per year. Therefore at last recorded testing figures of 69,633 between 2024 – 2025 it doesn’t take a mathematician to know that we need pretty much every single one of those passes. Take a moment to mingle over these figures. If like me, a sad test stat loser, you can see the patterns (excluding the Covid effect) to know if things don’t change, what will happen.

Notable mentions

Immigration – Immigration is generally a net positive when weighing up the level of skilled workers entering to assist every industry from ours to the NHS. Experienced drivers from abroad on working VISA’s have been utilised before, so could be used again.

Driver CPC – Fix the driver CPC so it’s not just a tick-box and a hassle. Make it relevant to drivers and their daily work tasks. There is also call for more practical CPC, including on-road coaching. 

Improved facilities – secure parking, clean and accessible toilets / showers (for both genders) and food at sensible prices at truck stops. If in doubt of what you’ll find when you stop, check out https://mytruckstop.co.uk/ or on Instagram. Real reviews from drivers on road about where’s hot, and where’s….not.

P.S. this is a tip of the cap to my honourable friend who last week spared my blushes when he quickly pointed out after publishing I had not filtered the Bootcamp data in totality to just HGV – what a wally. But nice to know people outside my Mum actually read these and care enough to make sure our shared industry goal is of the utmost accuracy. Kudos.