Rob Piper’s world is grey, blue and black.
The early morning sky is an inky blue-black as Piper drives his 44-tonne, 12-wheeled DAF XF lorry out of the Nursling industrial estate in Southampton. At this time of day – 6am – the endless grey roads consist mainly of lorries. Their metal bullbars flash a friendly smile in the halogen glare of each other’s headlights.
After mind-numbing loops of concrete motorway, Piper finishes driving mid-afternoon. Lorry drivers used to do 16- or 18-hour shifts, but now they are monitored by a digital tachograph card; Piper inserts his into a slot above the dashboard. It records all the lorry’s data: speed, distance travelled, breaks taken, total driving hours.
Piper may drive for a maximum of nine hours a day and he must take a 45-minute break after four and a half hours. He can work a maximum of 60 hours a week. (In normal circumstances, drivers can work for only 56 hours a week, but the government has extended this temporarily due to a shortage of drivers.) The data goes to his employer, the haulage firm Youngs, which has to produce it on request to the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency, the government body that checks compliance.
The law is strict, with good reason. “You’re driving a killing machine,” says Piper. Long-distance lorry driving has a narcoleptic effect, especially after lunch. Lorry drivers swap photos of bad accidents like trading cards. Piper was sent a particularly graphic one recently. In it, a lorry half-hangs from a motorway bridge. He shuddered when he saw it.
The run-up to Christmas is always a wearying time for the UK’s lorry drivers, but 2021 was exceptionally busy. All year, the haulage industry struggled with vacancies, mostly down to an exodus of European drivers after Brexit, but also because of Covid. It is estimated that there is a shortage of more than 85,000 drivers in the UK. Those who remain have been left to pick up the slack.
“We’re seeing chronic staff shortages,” says Rod McKenzie, the managing director for policy at the Road Haulage Association. “And we have an ageing driver population. When you have an ageing population of workers and they’re not being refreshed by younger people, you’re in a bad place.”
Youngs has lost many drivers; all the haulage companies have. About 20 of its 40 drivers across four depots returned to EU countries, including Romania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Bulgaria, post-Brexit. To retain staff, pay has risen by about 30% across the sector. “To be perfectly candid, drivers’ wages needed to go up,” says Rob Hollyman, a director at Youngs. “They were kept low by the consumer demanding cheap prices and so costs were cut everywhere.”
Even with these pay increases, drivers have left to work for the supermarkets, which typically offer higher wages; some supermarket drivers are paid more than £53,000 a year. But Piper isn’t tempted. It is difficult work, with multiple drop-offs throughout the day, and you have to work weekends. Piper prefers to have some time at home with his wife and their three dogs, Tilly, Lulu and Bella. From Monday to Friday, Piper is alone, with only the ashes of his chihuahua, Toby, for company. Toby swings from the roof of the cab in a small felt bag, with a heart embroidered on it. “He’s with me all the time, that little man,” he says. The best bit of Piper’s week is Friday afternoon, when he gets back and the dogs jump all over him, jealous for his attention.
On the road again … Piper sets off from Southampton for an 11am delivery in Swindon.
Piper is old enough to remember how things were before the tachograph cards (the 59-year-old has been a driver for 33 years). There was no heating in winter, nor air-conditioning in summer; no kettles or fridge-freezers or curtains to block out the sun. The engine was so loud that the seat shook. (Piper is partially deaf; his doctor says it is because of the job.) The lorries were manual and the rubber housing around the gear stick always had holes in it, which drivers would bind with jumpers to stop the cold coming in. (All newer models, including Piper’s, are automatic.) There were no beds in the cab, so drivers slept across the seats at night. They never wore seatbelts. Many still don’t.
When asked, Piper says that things are better now, safer, and he means it. But in his heart he prefers how things were before – before the tachograph cards, the medical he must pass every three years, the 35 hours of training every five years to renew his Driver Certificate of Professional Competence, all of which he has to pay for from his £700-a-week wages. “Before, you got in a truck and drove,” Piper says. “Now, you’re dictated on the hours you can do, and where you can go, and what you can do. There’s just no fun in it any more.”
But these restrictions demonstrably work: lorry driving is safer than it was a decade ago. There were 54 deaths of goods-vehicle occupants, a category that includes large- and heavy-goods vehicles, in 2020, down 13% from 2010.
Monday to Friday, when he is out on the road, Piper sleeps in his lorry. If he is unlucky, he has to park wherever he can. Industrial estates are usually OK: there are toilets and security gates, meaning Piper doesn’t have to worry about thieves siphoning off his diesel or jacking open the back of the vehicle and making off with his cargo. If he is very unlucky, he has to pull over in a layby. He sleeps badly on those nights, waking at the slightest noise.
But today, an unexceptional Monday in early October, Piper is lucky. He ends up at Eling Wharf in Southampton, where Youngs rents space for its drivers. There are toilets and showers, as well as a small office in a repurposed shipping container, painted blue, with a kettle, a fridge and a microwave. Piper drinks tea and looks out across the industrial estate.
He sees a dishwater sky reflected in brackish puddles around the site. He sees workmen preparing tomorrow’s loads and carrying out maintenance on a vehicle. Without its trailer, the lorry seems exposed, like a great metal crab missing its carapace. By now, 4pm, what little light remains is mud-coloured.
The waiting game … with delays in Swindon holding up the unloading of his delivery, Piper takes the opportunity to check his calendar and rest his eyes.
After Piper has finished his dinner, he returns to his lorry. He climbs six feet into the cab, which is immaculately clean. He takes off his boots and leaves them on the step, careful to shut them in when he closes the door, so they don’t fall out. He closes the curtains across the windscreen and undresses. He puts the heating on. He calls his wife, to let her know that he is OK. He always speaks to her twice a day, at 12.30pm and 7.30pm. She worries otherwise.
Afterwards, he lies across the single bed behind the seats and turns on the flatscreen TV at the end of his bed. He likes having the TV on – it feels like company. He watches Emmerdale first, then Coronation Street and EastEnders. By Corrie, Piper is usually half-asleep. By EastEnders, he is definitely asleep.
As he sleeps, the tachograph uploads his data for the day. The computer floods the cab with a bright light that other drivers complain about, but Piper is used to it; he doesn’t stir.
Staff shortages aren’t confined to the drivers. More often than not, when Piper arrives at his destination, there are no workers available to unload his cargo. On another Monday later in October, Piper drives from Southampton to Birmingham with a full cargo of baby car seats. He gets to the warehouse at 11am, as requested; Piper takes pride in his job and is rarely late. There are no staff available to empty the lorry. Piper waits until 2pm, but there are still no staff free, so he returns to Southampton.
Man’s best friend … the ashes of Piper’s chihuahua, Toby, hang in his cab.
He drives back the next day and waits all afternoon. Still no staff. He spends the night in Birmingham, meaning that the firm has to pay demurrage, the fee set after the three-hour window for unloading has expired. There is a kebab van on the industrial estate where he is sleeping, which he considers, but, on account of his diabetes, Piper makes do with a microwaveable hot pot. Finally, on Wednesday, the car seats are unloaded and Piper goes back to Southampton.
This is the life of a lorry driver: endless waiting. Piper waits at Southampton docks to be assigned to a loading bay. He waits for his trailer – or box, as he calls it – to be lifted on to his lorry by a straddle carrier, a freight-carrying vehicle that looks like a giant stamp. He waits at his destination for his cargo to be unloaded. When he started, the waiting irritated him. “You get used to it,” he says.
While he waits, Piper flicks through his favourite truck magazines: Commercial Motor; Truck & Driver. Sometimes he naps, although he always wakes up when he feels the lorry is almost empty; he can tell from how it shifts on the wheels. He speaks on his phone to his friends at work – Piper calls them the container boys. (Lorry driving is an overwhelmingly male profession: of the 315,000 registered HGV drivers in the UK, just 2,200 are female.) There is Alan, on whom Piper likes to play practical jokes, and Lloyd, who is obsessed with unusual food innovations: jam-flavoured teabags, lemon drizzle digestive biscuits, roast potato crisps.
Lorry drivers tend to speak about one of five things: routes, traffic, schedules, other drivers and food. If Piper discovers a useful titbit – perhaps a bakery he likes to stop at has closed down, or a client told him something interesting as they were unloading his lorry – he passes it on to Alan and Lloyd carefully for inspection, like a piece of ancient pottery at a dig. “There is a lorry-driver grapevine,” Piper says.
This camaraderie – the inane, meandering chats – makes the job tolerable. Lorry driving is lonely work and the job has an emotional price. “I know I missed my kids growing up,” says Piper, who has three children and five grandchildren. “I only saw them weekends.”
October passes in a bleary circuit of motorway service stations and harried clients who complain about shipping costs and staff shortages. And then, at 6.07am on 11 November, a rent in the fabric of Piper’s everyday life. A 54-year-old cyclist dies after colliding with a lorry at the entrance to Southampton docks, causing tailbacks all day. Through conversations with the other boys in the yard, Piper gleans the particulars of the crash: the spot where the cyclist became affixed to the lorry; the stretch of road along which he was dragged; and the place where the driver made his grisly discovery.
Southampton docks are the beating heart of the south coast’s haulage operation. Here, gleaming cars, children’s toys and electrical appliances arrive from all over the world via inconceivably huge container ships. They are then carried by lorry on the M3, north-east to London, or the A31, westwards to Totnes, or the A34, north to Stoke-on-Trent.
The container boys … Piper has a cup of tea with his friend Alan (top) and catches up with another colleague.
But, in the past 18 months, Southampton docks have often been congested. When Piper drives into the docks, they are backed up. He might wait there for two, even three, hours. The delays are worst in the afternoon. As he waits for his box to be loaded on to his lorry, Piper speaks to Alan and Lloyd on the phone. They gripe about the delays and wonder if it is down to Covid-induced staff shortages, as people are off sick and self-isolating.
To make matters worse, fuel prices have increased by nearly 20%. In June 2021, Youngs paid 99p a litre for fuel; by December, it was £1.17. “We have to pass it on to the consumer,” says Hollyman. “We have no other option.” (No one has managed to manufacture an electric HGV lorry, because of the fuel power needed to pull heavy loads, while the UK is not, in general, well set up for rail freight.)
Late in November, the lorry-driver grapevine yields more fruit. Three curtain-side lorries have their loads stolen during the night at Fleet services, on the M3 near Basingstoke, Hampshire. The trailers on curtain-side lorries are covered only by sheets of tarpaulin, affixed with ropes, which are easy to cut through. Piper hates driving curtain-side vehicles for this reason, especially around Christmas, when thieves surmise, correctly, that the lorries are full of valuable goods.
Piper was robbed six years ago, in the middle of the night. They took £180,000 worth of clothes. He felt the vehicle moving, but thought it was because of the soft ground on which he was parked, as well as the vibrations from passing traffic. Something felt off, though, so he pulled back the curtain on the passenger side of the cab. A man was standing there. He put one finger on his lips and slid another across his throat. Ten accomplices unloaded the van. Piper called the police, but they said there was nothing they could do. Afterwards, a doctor signed him off work for a week and prescribed him anti-anxiety medication. “It frightened me to bits,” he says.
The stress is constant. “It’s always in the back of your mind,” he says. “Where will I park? Will I be safe? When I wake up, I look out of my mirrors to see if there’s anyone around. I don’t want to go through that again. We’re targets all the time.” Many industrial estates are painted with double yellow lines, so lorry drivers are forced to park in laybys, where they sleep fitfully, fearful of being attacked and robbed. “People want their goods, but they don’t want you to park anywhere,” says Piper. “It’s horrible.”
Home from home … unlike in the old days, Piper’s cab is fitted with a bed, a TV and heating.
It is for this reason that the sector struggles to recruit staff, says McKenzie. “Conditions are poor,” he says. “There’s very little safe and secure lorry parking. There are few gold-standard lorry parks. And drivers are fed up with it.” In October, the chancellor, Rishi Sunak, announced £32.5m in funding for roadside facilities. “It costs around £40m to build a brand new lorry park, so he’s talking about upgrades to existing parks,” says McKenzie. “But when you see some of the parks we’ve got, they need a lot more than a brush-up.”
This is the stuff that really grinds down Piper, that makes him wish there was something else he could do. This and the lack of respect. Most clients are polite, but some can be awful. They refuse to let Piper use the toilets, or berate him for being late, even if he has explained that it is not his fault the docks were backed up.
During the first lockdown, things were different. Families waved at him from motorway bridges. “We were loved by the public because we delivered everything,” he says. “Now that it’s over, we get treated dreadfully. But if it wasn’t for us, you wouldn’t have the clothes on your back. The food in your house. Your car.”
A man once came to Piper’s house, in a village near Andover in Hampshire. He was campaigning against a distribution depot that a supermarket was planning to build nearby. He told Piper: “We don’t want lorries coming through here.” Piper was appalled. “I said: ‘Hold on, I’m a lorry driver. I’m fed up with people saying they don’t need lorries. How do you think you get your stuff?’”
By December, Piper is working punishingly long hours. At this time of year, he normally does a 13- or 14-hour shift, made up of his nine-hour drive time, but also mandatory breaks and waiting time. One Thursday morning, he has to wake up at 3.30am, in the Eling yard. Everything is dark and depressing. “It’s cold out,” he says. “You’re in there nice and warm. You pull the curtain back and look outside and think: ‘I don’t want to get up this morning.’” It is a wrench to leave his plastic-moulded bedroom, where he sleeps more soundly than he does at home.
Piper brews a cup of tea, makes his bed, then walks to the shower block through the gloom. Some drivers don’t bother, but Piper is fastidious about his personal hygiene. On his return, he checks the lorry, inspecting the wipers, tyres and brakes with a torch. He does the 10-minute drive to Nursling, listening to BBC Radio 2, before finding his load, strapping it down and collecting his paperwork from the office. Then it is on to Birmingham, where he has three drops. Collections in Newbury and Basingstoke will follow.
‘You’re snacking all the time’ … Piper tucks into a sandwich and a packet of crisps. Often, his only options for lunch are fast food or ready meals.
Lunch is a bacon, egg and sausage sandwich from a van in a layby outside Birmingham. He had planned to buy only a cup of tea, until he smelled the bacon. A pot belly is the lorry driver’s inheritance, like the salaryman’s gold watch or the Olympian’s medal cabinet. Lorry drivers are more likely than average to be obese, have diabetes, hypertension, heart disease, cancer, problems sleeping and musculoskeletal disorders. The average life expectancy of a male lorry driver is 76.6; for male doctors and lawyers, it is 82.5.
It is the sedentary nature of the job, but also the fact that it is almost impossible to eat healthily on the road. Before, there would be truck stops, which served home-cooked meals, but most have closed down; Piper’s only options come lunchtime are usually McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC, or a salt-filled ready meal. His doctor tells him to go for a walk in the evening to get some exercise, but that is unrealistic: he can’t leave his lorry unattended. Besides, he is always knackered. Piper’s friends have had heart attacks while driving; he had a stroke in 2000 and didn’t work for 18 months.
“It’s the style of life,” he says. “You sit here and you get bored. You think: I’m hungry, I’ll have a sandwich. I’ll have a bag of crisps. You’re snacking all the time. You drink tea until it comes out of your ears.”
Late in December, things go mad. “Everyone wants their containers and their deliveries urgently,” says Piper. He does a job in London on a Friday. The traffic is unbelievable. It takes nearly an hour to travel 15 miles (24km) around the North Circular. By the time he gets home, it is nearly 8pm.
He is working right up until Christmas. On 20 December, he drives from Southampton to Wellington in Somerset. He leaves Nursling at 6am with a cargo of wicker baskets, crammed into the back with not an inch to spare. Passing other lorry drivers, he has the feeling of being part of a pod of friendly whales.
In Wellington, the client wants to talk about the supply chain crisis. His shipping container costs have gone up from $2,000 (£1,490) to $15,000 (£11,160) in just 18 months, partly due to increased labour costs since Brexit, but also due to the supply chain crisis. The client runs a garden furniture business that is foundering: just this year, he had to return a million pounds’ worth of orders, because it was impossible to import the stock. He had two containers on the Ever Given, the container ship that got stuck in the Suez canal in March 2021, disrupting global trade for months.
“This is the picture across the world,” says Prof Edward Anderson, a supply chain expert at Imperial College London. Because globalised supply chains are run so efficiently, when something goes wrong – like the Ever Given – the impact can be catastrophic. The pandemic, too, has disrupted global trade. “Covid sits behind many of these disruptions,” says Anderson. “The pingdemic. People not being able to go to work.”
Covid has also created an international shortage of computer chips, which has had knock-on effects for the haulage sector, as these chips are used in automobiles. Youngs should have had 12 lorries delivered in November 2021, but it received only eight. All of the major lorry manufacturers have closed their books for 2022: you can’t get a new lorry now unless you have already ordered it.
As Piper waits for the client to unload the lorry, he calls Alan and then Lloyd. They chat about the traffic and their routes. Piper relays some gossip he heard from the owner of the garden centre about how he came to buy the business. Later, in the twilight of the Eling yard, Piper wrings out the story a third time for his colleague Steve. “Is that right?” Steve says.
Today has been a good day. Friendly clients, no traffic. Back in Eling, Piper gets to sleep.
But, as he approaches the culmination of his more than 30-year career as a lorry driver, in all honesty, Piper has regrets. He wishes he had paid attention at school, instead of bunking off every Friday to work on a milk float, and got the grades to do something else, like become a truck mechanic. “I’m a fool,” he says. “But it’s the only thing I know how to do.”
‘All I wanted to do was to drive a truck’ … Piper in his cab.
Yet, when his stroke took him off the road, he was miserable. “I thought that was it,” says Piper. “My lorry-driving days were over. And my life was over, in a way.” Lorry driving is his life’s work – and his passion. “It’s sad, really,” he says. “Ever since I was at school, all I wanted to do was to drive a truck.”
When Piper says that sometimes he hates being a lorry driver, what he means is that he hates how the job has changed. Piper is nostalgic for the days when lorry drivers had the freedom to drive wherever they liked, for however long they wanted, rules and regulations be damned. He has always been like this: even when he was at school. “I don’t like change,” he says. “I like things to be the way they were.”
The best days, the days that really stick out, are the ones where people are kind. Ordinary human kindness takes on an outsized importance in Piper’s memory: he collects these encounters and turns them over in his mind. Take the time he was doing a house removal in Devon. It was a bucolic summer’s day. He drove through a tiny village, past cottages entwined with roses and an old man smoking a pipe. When he got to the house, it turned out he had arrived a day early, by mistake. The client was a woman in her 30s. They sat out together on the patio, chatting and drinking tea. He could hear the church bells ringing. It was lovely.
But these days are rare. For the most part, lorry drivers are treated with disdain. Motorists cut them up. Nimbys campaign against proposed lorry parks, as if drivers should not be able to eat and sleep in comfort and safety. Environmentalists shudder at the emissions, while wearing clothes and eating food conveyed to them by lorry. “Lorry drivers are essential workers,” says McKenzie. “We told them that during Covid. But we have not done a lot as a nation to back that up.”
There are so many people like Piper, all over the country. They bring everything from our fuel to our medical supplies and, for the most part, they do it quietly, without recognition. “Lorry drivers are the forgotten side of the supply chain jigsaw,” says Anderson. “Consumers see the last mile and the people who deliver parcels to our front doors. But they don’t necessarily see the lorry drivers.”
After an exhausting week, Piper drives home on Christmas Eve, past houses where all the presents – and the turkey – arrived via lorry. He lets himself in. The dogs jump all over him, mad with excitement. A few days’ respite before Piper starts up the engine again. Who else would bring us the freight of Britain?
This article was amended on 10 February 2022. A reference to the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency should have been to the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency.