£2 Diesel, Empty Slots and Missing Drivers: What the Lorry Industry Wants You to Know

You’ve probably seen the headlines. Diesel has passed £2 a litre for the first time ever. Maybe you’ve noticed a gap on the supermarket shelf, or a delivery that turned up later than it should have.

Most coverage treats these as separate stories: a fuel story, a shopping story, a jobs story. From inside the industry, they look like one story. We train HGV drivers in Sheffield, we talk to operators every week, and what we’re hearing is a lot more joined-up than the news makes it sound.

Here’s what’s actually going on.

1. The fuel crisis hits lorries first, and hardest

On 2 October 2026, RAC figures showed the average UK diesel price passing £2 a litre for the first time, at 200.01p. When the conflict involving Iran began on 28 February, it was 142.38p. That’s a rise of about 58p a litre, or roughly 40%, in seven months.

For a family car, that’s an extra £30 or so to fill a 55-litre tank. A lorry is a different scale:

Why is diesel being hit harder than petrol? The UK imports more than half of its diesel, and it has lost refining capacity: Grangemouth stopped refining in April 2025 and Lindsey closed the same year. With the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries about a fifth of the world’s seaborne oil, closed to commercial tankers, and the Red Sea route disrupted too, Europe is short of diesel in particular.

Then there’s tax. Of that £2 a litre, about 86p goes to the Treasury: 52.95p in fuel duty plus roughly 33p VAT. The current 5p duty cut ends on 31 December 2026, with a 3p rise pencilled in for January and another 2p in March 2027. The RHA estimates that a 5p fuel duty rise adds £2,325 a year to one lorry’s fuel bill and £1.9 billion a year to household living costs. The Autumn Budget on 28 October is when that gets decided.

2. Why hauliers are turning down supermarket work

This is the part most shoppers don’t know.

According to the RHA, road haulage moves 81% of UK freight, including 98% of food, agricultural and consumer products. As the RHA’s managing director Richard Smith puts it: “Almost everything on a supermarket shelf got there on a lorry.”

But the companies doing that work run on haulage profit margins of about 2%. For every £100 a haulier invoices, around £2 is profit. Fuel makes up somewhere between a fifth and a third of their running costs. When fuel jumps 40%, that 2% can be gone several times over. The £19,400 extra fuel per truck mentioned above is more than five times the RHA’s benchmark profit of about £3,500 per lorry per year.

Big retail and distribution contracts are often agreed at fixed prices, sometimes months in advance. Many hauliers are locked into them, and when they try to add a fuel surcharge they hit resistance. The RHA’s survey of 550 haulage operators found:

  • 84.6% had seen their margins shrink
  • 56.8% said fuel costs were squeezing their cashflow
  • Only around 1 in 10 could fully pass higher fuel costs on to customers
  • Only 39% were confident they could keep going under current pressures

So operators are having to make a hard call. If a regular supermarket run now costs more to deliver than it pays, the only sensible business decision is to stop doing it. Where they can, hauliers are choosing better-paying loads, renegotiating, or walking away from the work altogether. Where they can’t, some are going under. Insolvency Service data shows that 259 freight transport companies went insolvent in England and Wales in the first eight months of 2026, which is more than one every day.

It’s not that hauliers don’t want to move your food. A business on a 2% margin can’t afford to carry it at a loss.

Hauliers who do get a surcharge through are charging a lot: one operator’s UK haulage fuel surcharge rose from 12% in July to 19% by late September. Somebody pays that, and eventually it reaches the shelf price.

3. The driver shortage never went away

Remember 2021, the empty shelves and the queues at petrol stations? A big part of that was a shortage of HGV drivers. Things improved for a while, but the underlying problem was never fixed, and it’s coming back:

At the same time, one of the main routes into the job has closed. The government’s HGV Skills Bootcamps helped more than 20,000 people get their licences and a job, but central funding for HGV Skills Bootcamps ended in 2025. The chair of the Logistics Skills Network warned this could leave a shortfall of at least 15,000 new drivers a year, and training providers have warned that the driver shortage could hit UK retail supply chains.

4. How it all links together

Put those three pieces together and you get a loop that feeds itself:

  1. Fuel costs soar → haulage firms’ 2% margins disappear.
  2. Hauliers can’t pass the cost on → they turn down low-paying contracts, including supermarket runs, or go out of business.
  3. Firms fold or shrink → drivers leave, and fewer firms can afford to train new ones.
  4. Fewer drivers → the ones who are left can (rightly) be choosier, and wages and rates go up.
  5. Higher rates and fewer trucks → deliveries get harder to cover, costs reach the shelf, and the gaps start showing.

Logistics UK’s latest tracker shows the pressure building: 67.6% of firms expect domestic road freight rates to rise. ONS figures show motor fuel prices were 23% higher than a year earlier in August, and transport was the biggest driver of the rise in inflation to 3.1%.

5. What this means for you

As a shopper, you’re likely to see higher prices on everyday goods, more substitutions on online orders, and occasional gaps on the shelves, especially in the run-up to Christmas. The RHA’s warning is simple: “a fuel duty hike is a food price hike.”

None of this is a reason to panic-buy. That’s what turned the 2021 shortage into a crisis. It is worth understanding, though, because the people keeping the shelves full are under more strain than most of us realise.

6. Why it’s a good time to become an HGV driver

There’s another side to all this. When an industry that moves 98% of the nation’s food is short of tens of thousands of drivers, qualified drivers are in demand.

Drivers who are already qualified are being offered better rates. Agencies need cover, and operators are keen on reliable people. If you’ve ever thought about a career behind the wheel, with steady work, decent pay and a job that won’t be outsourced or automated any time soon, the gap the industry is facing is your opportunity.

With the government-funded bootcamps gone, the route in now is good, focused training. That’s what we do at Go Big Driving School, offering HGV driver training in Sheffield for anyone ready to get their Category C or C+E licence.