Will Truck Driving In The UK Ever Get Better?

I was a class 1 and 2 HGV driver for 7 years before just quitting and starting my own little business doing something completely different. Luckily my little business has worked ok and I’ve been doing it now for 6 years. I work 6-7 hours a day mon-fri and earn about £40k a year.

I’m always worried if my business started to fail I would have to go back to HGV driving.

When I first started HGV driving around 13 years ago it was pretty bad, class 2 multi drop work doing 25-30 drops a day, rushing around, lots of town driving and stopping and all for £9.80 an hour.

I had about 4 HGV jobs with my last one being a mixture of class 1 and class 2 driving and was there for 3 years. I would get up at 3am and be back home about 4-5pm.

During this time the wage increase never went up much, I think I left and my wage was about £35k a year for 50–60 hours a week. Also they had introduced forward facing cameras and driver facing cameras .

The whole ‘King Of The Road’ dream I thought it would be was completely not happening. In reality you could go work 60 hours a week in McDonald’s now or shelf stacking and get £36k a year now. Also for a job that the majority of people don’t want to do they were making it worse and worse by even longer hours and then putting a camera I. Your face for 12 hours.

Will the UK trucking scene ever improve? With minimum wage rising so much, the stress, hours, unsociable hours, constant monitoring with tracking and cameras, other drivers, VOSA and in a lot of cases heavy manual labour to go with it. It just doesn’t seem worth it at all. My current business is totally unqualified and I currently make more a year working 35 hours a week than I did working 55 hours a week as a HGV driver.

When I left HGV driving it makes me push so hard at what I do now as it left me NEVER wanting to go back and it only seemed to be getting worse.