Liam Halligan: Whose fault is the HGV driver shortage?

Everyone knows Britain now has a shortage of HGV drivers. That’s causing chaos, upending supply chains, disrupting our ports and helping to drive up inflation.

When you can’t get the right goods and components to the right depots, warehouses, shops and factories at the right time, prices rise. And, of course, a shortage of HGV drivers was central to recent concerns over fuel shortages – which led to panic buying, as drivers queued at petrol stations to fill their tanks to the brim.

Amidst this national lack of lorry drivers, a row has broken out between ministers and Britain’s biggest haulage lobbying group.

Government sources say trust between the Road Haulage Association and the Department of Transport is now “broken”, with relations in “deep freeze” following claims the RHA is biased against Brexit and helped to spark the recent fuel crisis.

The Road Haulage Association speaks for thousands of logistics firms across the UK. But Transport Secretary Grant Schapps has accused the trade body of leaking comments from a confidential telephone conference call to the press, in which BP said it was reducing deliveries to some petrol stations because of a driver shortage – setting off panic buying.

To this heady brew of intrigue must be added the DVLA – the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency. DVLA is sitting on 54,000 HGV licences – many of them renewals – that await processing.

And now, in a bid to head off a strike, the government has promised DVLA staff hundreds of pounds in extra pay – with ministers concerned industrial action by public-sector unions would make the HGV driver backlog even worse.

On top of that, ministers have decided foreign lorry drivers can make unlimited numbers of UK pick-ups and drop-offs within a fixed period – in a change to so called “cabotage rules”. Yet these new rules, designed to prevent product shortages in the run-up to Christmas, may not come in for months.

The RHA is anyway warning these rule changes would allow overseas haulage firms to do "unlimited work at low rates, undercutting UK hauliers".

And now Sharon Graham, the new leader of Unite, has weighed in, describing the treatment of UK HGV drivers as "nothing short of a disgrace". The UK's second-largest union has threatened to launch the largest lorry drivers' strike since the 1979 winter of discontent - which, if it happens, could bring the UK economy to a standstill.

The UK's logistics industry is in a mess - that's likely to get worse before it gets better. And at the heart of that mess - a gaping lack of people to drive the lorries upon which so much of our economy depends.

So that’s your On The Money debate in this hour – “Whose fault is the HGV driver shortage?”