Forget the fuel crisis – the commodity in shortest supply in Britain is ministerial responsibility

Editorial: Grant Shapps and his colleagues were asleep at the wheel when there was still time to plan a response to what was approaching with all the manifest force of a runaway juggernaut

The present shortage of drivers should not have come as some great shock (PA Wire)

When Grant Shapps states that there is no fuel shortage in Britain, he is making himself look and sound a little foolish.

It is true that there is plenty of oil still being imported, or pumped out of the North Sea, and more than adequate capacity in the refineries; but that is of little practical use if the fuel cannot be moved because there aren’t enough tanker drivers around – as Mr Shapps knows full well.

Are motorists who need to get their children to school or travel to work supposed to be soothed into contentment by the transport secretary assuring us that what is a problem isn’t really a problem, and that even if it is a crisis, it’s all down to Covid? Do they care that he thinks it’s not his fault?

Soon, emergency vehicles, smaller airports, and supplies of fuel oil for rural homes will also be badly disrupted by the shortage of tanker drivers. Even if it was a result of postponed driving tests during Covid – and that must certainly be a factor – or the after-effects of Brexit (again a factor, though ministers prefer not to acknowledge that one), the point is that the present shortage of drivers should not have come as some great shock.

The job of government is to plan ahead – and to make necessary contingency plans for an approaching emergency. The department for transport, above all others, should have been well aware of what was happening to driver training and the testing figures during the pandemic, and should also have had some inkling that Brexit was generating an exodus of EU drivers and EU-based operators. Unlike the coronavirus itself, it was not some mysterious new phenomenon.

Indeed, Britain has before experienced the devastating effects of a shortage of lorry drivers, or of other deliberate disruption to fuel supplies. In the 1970s it was external action by the OPEC oil producers – later by Iran – and also strike action that cut the pumps off; in the 2000s it was the fuel protests, or threats of them, and the blockading of refineries that caused shortages and panic.

In each episode, what was soon apparent was how rapidly the situation could deteriorate, especially once panic set in among the general public. Then, as now, ministerial pleas for calm tended not to resonate.

The lessons of history, then, were not learned – and, no doubt, more recent warnings from haulage industry leaders and the transport union Unite about the effects of Brexit and Covid seem to have been ignored.

In short, Mr Shapps and his colleagues were asleep at the wheel when there was still time to plan a response to what was approaching with all the manifest force of a runaway juggernaut.

There should have been an immediate relaxation of the restrictions on foreign drivers and freight operators working in the UK. A sort of mini-reversal of Brexit should have been executed, with an open-door policy, to prevent the disaster that is currently overtaking the nation.

Instead, Mr Shapps chose to relax driver-training tests and extend working hours – gambling with road safety. The government, in the months since Brexit, has had a choice about protecting domestic supply chains that depend overwhelmingly on road transport.

They could either suffer some political embarrassment from a partial U-turn on Brexit, or they could choose to risk the complete national humiliation of the petrol pumps running dry, and try to blame it on Covid. Evidently, the commodity in shortest supply in Britain is ministerial responsibility.