GRIMSBY, home to Britain’s best fish and chips, has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. Yet in the very same town an industry is crying out for workers. Grimsby’s port welcomes everything from Russian wood-pallets to French cars. But as adverts around the town attest, road-haulage firms, which transport these goods around the country, complain about a shortage of labour. The trucking puzzle hints at three problems facing the wider labour market: discouraged workers, unambitious employers and a government that does too little to get people into jobs.

Lobby groups estimate that the road-haulage industry is short of 45,000 drivers (the government agrees). Only 17,000 new truck-drivers’ licences are issued each year, half of what is needed. The result of this lack of personnel is that haulage firms must turn down work. Products turn up late. With three times as much freight transported by road as by rail and water combined, this is bad news for consumers.

One reason for the labour shortage is that people do not fancy the work. Driving the lorries is not tricky; after having a go, your correspondent can attest that the wagons are surprisingly nimble. But on the road, finding decent food or a shower can be tough. Parked lorries are easy targets for thieves. Unions complain about the “spy in the cab”, a camera in some vehicles which monitors the driver to enforce limits on driving hours. Some bosses use the camera to bully drivers into doing more work. And the hours are long. Of the roughly 1,000 types of jobs classified by the Office for National Statistics, none involves a longer working week than the road-freight industry. More than 60 hours is common. Enter the cab of a lorry and the first thing you spot is a fold-down bunk where drivers often spend the night.

Theory suggests that hauliers could simply raise wages to a high enough level to persuade workers to put up with these downsides, thus eliminating the labour shortage. Yet pay has remained stubbornly low. The average hourly wage in road-freight transport is £10.44 ($13.74), below the overall median of £11.80. And in spite of the growing labour shortage in recent years, in nominal terms pay has grown at the same pace as the average since 2008. In real terms it has fallen.

Bosses say that raising wages by much would be impossible. The country’s 70,000-odd haulage companies compete closely on cost. Foreign firms are another source of competition, though for now they are minor players (in 2013 just 3.3% of heavy-goods-vehicle miles in Britain were driven by foreign-registered vehicles). And as supermarkets have started to compete more fiercely on price there has been “enormous pressure” on hauliers to cut costs further, according to one witness in a recent parliamentary report.

Circle the wagons

Hauliers would be able to afford better wages if they were more productive. But in recent years, like many other British industries, they have skimped on investment. In the transportation and storage sector, private capital spending is 4% lower than in 2008. Firms may think that marginal improvements are hardly worth the expense when driverless lorries are on the way (see article). In March the government announced that trials would start soon. So fleets are getting older: in 2006-15 the proportion of vehicles on the road aged ten or more years rose from 23% to 29%.

With bad conditions and poor pay, it may not be a surprise that unemployed folk in places like Grimsby shun a life on the road. Young Britons are particularly lorry-shy. Just 1% of heavy-goods drivers are under 25, compared with 12% of the total employed population. Small wonder that haulage companies have been plugging gaps with workers from eastern Europe. In the offices of Downton Group, a firm based near Gloucester that delivers everything from magazines to tea, signs are in English and Polish.

For the Britons who do want to try their luck, haulage is not easy to break into. It costs about £3,000 to train as a new “C+E” driver, the highest licence classification—a big ask for someone with no job. Some firms, like Downton, pay for their employees’ training. Leonie John became a driver last year thanks to its apprenticeship programme. A former hairdresser, she always wanted to drive heavy-goods vehicles, a rare thing in an industry where women make up just 1% of drivers.

Generally, however, haulage companies are reluctant to fund such courses, since it is all too easy for a rival to poach employees trained up at their expense. There is only one haulage apprenticeship within 40 miles of Grimsby, offering a measly annual wage of £7,000.

The haulage industry may thus be suffering from “market failure”. In such a situation, economists recommend that the government steps in. However, it is not easy to get help from the state with the costs of training. Lorry-driving is considered a low-level skill, which makes it tricky to qualify for “advanced learner loans”, a government scheme to help with the costs of vocational courses.

Changes may be afoot. The newish government has talked up its “industrial strategy” and has recently offered to improve funding for lorry-driving apprenticeships. It has been vague about details (such as the budget). In any case, without also increasing retention in the industry, the parliamentary report concluded, such efforts may amount merely to “top[ping] up a leaking bucket”. In the next decade one-fifth of Britain’s lorry drivers are expected to retire. The puzzle seen in places like Grimsby is unlikely to be solved soon.