I doubt it. If the pay was high enough and the term was long enough, you'd see interest from retired licensed drivers and licensed driver's who'd changed jobs. Then you have 2 months to train up and license new drivers.

Plus you can outbid others who are contracting owned and operator drivers.

If the pay is good, demand is high and all you need is to go on a two month course, I'd bet a lot of unemployed people would be eager to do that. The "shortage" is indeed because of Brexit, but paying a thousand dollars an hour will most certainly magically summon workers en mass in a few months.

Unless people see through it as a short term gimmick in an unstable industry.

Given the example of last two years, what are the chances people see through anything.

There are currently many more licensed UK drivers not working in the industry than there are vacancies.

Maybe ask why so many people have chosen to do other things such as amazon delivery or other such jobs that pay better, have better conditions and don't require regular medicals and certification, etc paid from one's own pocket?

> There are currently many more licensed UK drivers not working in the industry than there are vacancies.

Do you have data to back this up (specifically for HGV-licensed drivers, which is what the post you replied to was talking about)?

I briefly looked for stats around valid HGV licences out there, but couldn't find any recent figures.

It was from a radio interview I heard the other day, not sure what the actual figure was or the official source. So, take my comment as unproven.

Raising prices doesn't only move toward equilibrium by increasing the quantity supplied -- it also decreases the quantity demanded.

There are people with commercial driving licenses who aren't currently working as truck drivers. They could be recruited if employers raised wages.

And a regular truck driver can be trained in a few months. It's not rocket science.

> And a regular truck driver can be trained in a few months. It's not rocket science.

I get why you've said this, but I'm not sure this kind of flippant remark is helpful -- what exactly isn't rocket science? Is it the actual act of training a truck driver? Is it the act of writing down the things needed to get more truck drivers?

Actual process is non-trivial, expensive (you need to persuade people to leave their families), time consuming and involves a chain of other non-trivial time-consuming tasks that currently doesn't really exist (or is at least regionally bottlenecked).

Sure the market will probably eventually sort it out, but that seems neither a quick nor an efficient way of doing things in this case, where this was widely predicted years previous + is now critically required

> Sure the market will probably eventually sort it out, but that seems neither a quick nor an efficient way of doing things in this case, where this was widely predicted years previous + is now critically required

Isn’t the whole idea behind the benefit a free/freeish market provides that it is the most efficient system for allocating resources?

Mind you efficient != resilient

I'm slightly leery of that. But to be fair to the markets here, gov policy + protracted negotiations + lack of concrete information + conflicting guidelines surely made it impossible for a market to actually function properly.

(to be fair to the gov, not sure how they could have operated differently without advising everything the remain side was warning against. Which would have worked I guess, but would have also been bizarre and probably tanked the economy [more])

So based in that, how can it efficiently allocate resources? Given time, sure, maybe in theory. Which is great unless you're a. a business that has actual costs now or b. a real person that needs to eat and pay rent now.

With above in mind, I don't think it's about resilience. Maybe that ultra-simplified answer works! But it seems a pat free market 101 answer -- ignore the context, market will fix it.

> And a regular truck driver can be trained in a few months. It's not rocket science.

They still need to pass the tests, there is a backlog of people waiting to take them.