Survey of Current and Former Heavy Goods Vehicle Drivers in the UK, 2022-2026

The global economy is structured around, and highly dependent on, fast frictionless movement of goods from sites of production to sites of consumption. Road freight provides a range of critical social and economic services, from ensuring supermarkets shelves are stocked, to delivering medicines to hospitals, and bricks to construction sites. And 79% of goods in the UK are moved by road, predominantly in trucks. Yet remarkably little is known about the lives of people working in road freight.

In summer 2021, a shortage of truck drivers made headlines in the British press. Yet this issue is not new - it has been exacerbated by Brexit and the COVID19 pandemic - but since the 2008/9 Global Financial Crisis there have been too few drivers entering the sector leading to an aging workforce, and a chronic shortage of drivers. As well as this, UK truck drivers are predominantly white (95.5%) and male (99%), statistics that are mirrored in many other countries too.

Truck drivers are hypermobile in that they are required to travel - and be constantly on the move - for their work. But this model of work is incredibly difficult to manage for those who have unpaid work responsibilities including, but not limited to caring for children or relatives. A host of factors have been used to explain the exodus of freight drivers from the sector. But we don't really know why people don't want to become - or remain - truck drivers anymore. While UK mass media headlines are talking of rising salaries, this pay rise is not sector-wide, and more importantly, pay is just one of many issues for workers.

This research asks how logistics can be reconfigured to improve workers' lives, and through this, attract and retain a diverse workforce. It examines how the work truck drivers do is represented by the mass media and within the sector itself, how truck drivers experience their work - particularly those underrepresented in the sector, and what can be done to make truck driving a job that people want to do. In doing so, our research will contribute to improving the logistics sector and workers' lives in the UK and beyond.

The research responds to three research questions: (1) How is trucking work experienced, coordinated and represented? (2) What needs to change to attract and retain a diversity of workers? (3) Who are the key actors in effecting change?

Answering these questions requires both a depth and breadth of understanding of workers' lives. We will do this this through the use of quantitative (survey) and qualitative (document analysis, ethnographies, interviews, mobile methods) methods, which engage with truck drivers, their families, freight managers and routers, and the wider sector and media, obtaining data which are audial, numerical, textual and visual.

This research will include the first ever large-scale quantitative survey of UK truck drivers including both current and past workers, offering a unique perspective on the experiences, views and practices of UK truck drivers. This will be coupled with 'deep dive' methods allowing us to learn about truck drivers' experiences in more detail. Mobile ethnographies will allow the drivers to take charge, and show us their working lives, while the workplace ethnography will allow us to understand the inner workings of the freight office, which coordinates truck driving work.

We will interact with academic, industry and government stakeholders throughout the project. Both Academic and Industry Advisory Groups have already been established, and have supported the design of the research proposal. These two groups will support the execution and impact arising from the research. A number of events and activities will be used to engage with a wider range of stakeholders, this includes: Webinars and workshops, industry magazine publications, social media engagement, non-academic reports, policy briefs, academic journal articles, and conference sessions and presentations.

This survey comprises responses from 1,980 current and former Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) drivers in the UK, including 1,756 drivers who were working as truck drivers at the time of the survey ('current' drivers) and 224 former drivers. The survey oversampled women drivers (10% of survey sample while being under 2% of the HGV driver population in the UK), and consists of 267 women driver participants (229 working as truck drivers at the time of the survey and 38 former drivers).

The survey was carried out with the aim to generate primary quantitative data on drivers’ experiences of work and everyday life in order to inform government and industry efforts aimed at improving the recruitment and retention of HGV drivers. Questions covered a range of themes, including experiences of HGV driving work, compatibility between work and life outside employment, health and wellbeing, discrimination, job satisfaction, future employment intentions, and measures needed to improve drivers’ working lives.

The mobile nature of HGV driving work means that it is distinct from many other forms of work. Drivers are often hundreds or even thousands of miles from their homes, families and friends. Our survey findings show this has implications, not only for drivers’ social lives but also for their caring responsibilities and physical and mental
health. The key characteristics shaping worker experience identified by the Trucking Lives survey are: personal characteristics, especially gender, age, sexuality, ethnicity and caring responsibilities; and employment characteristics, specifically contract type, employment
type, working hours, years of experience, company size, class of HGV driven and the number of nights spent away from home (‘tramping’).

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