Tesco BLOWS UP the Entire British Lorry Industry With Latest Announcement!

Tesco creates its own fleet, disrupting British haulage with 2,500 new trucks and ending contracts with major contractors over 3 years.

Key Takeaways

Tesco is building its own haulage fleet, ending contracts with most third-party hauliers over 3 years.
This move threatens the financial stability of major haulage contractors heavily reliant on Tesco business.
Tesco’s attractive driver packages could cause a significant driver migration from independent firms.
The haulage industry faces a critical driver shortage and aging workforce, exacerbating disruption.
Tesco’s fleet expansion involves major investment in trucks, depots, and infrastructure nationwide.

What the video covers

Tesco has registered 14,973 lorries hauling its crates weekly, sourced from DVLA data.
Tesco filed to become majority shareholder in Tesco Fleet Partnership Limited, a new fleet company ordering 2,500 new trucks worth £412 million.
The new fleet will internalize primary haulage operations within 36 months, ending reliance on third-party contractors like Wincanton and Eddie Stobart.
Tesco’s move was not disclosed to unions or existing contractors before the public filing.
Wincanton and Eddie Stobart face significant revenue loss, with Tesco contracts representing 31% and 18% of their income respectively.
Existing haulage contracts have long termination clauses, so Tesco will transition gradually as contracts expire.
Many contracts were signed during the pandemic at low rates, making haulage firms financially vulnerable to losing Tesco business.
Tesco Fleet Partnership offers drivers higher pay (£38,000 + bonuses) and better benefits, likely attracting drivers from independent firms.
The British haulage industry faces a driver shortage of around 52,000, with an aging workforce and few young entrants.
Tesco is building new depots and infrastructure at key hubs, signaling a major shift in the UK haulage landscape.

Chapters

What is Tesco's new haulage strategy?

Tesco has created Tesco Fleet Partnership Limited to internalize its primary haulage operations by building its own fleet of 2,500 trucks and ending contracts with third-party hauliers within 36 months.

How will Tesco's move affect existing haulage contractors?

Major contractors like Wincanton and Eddie Stobart will lose a significant portion of their revenue from Tesco contracts as Tesco transitions to its own fleet, potentially causing financial strain and contract losses over the next 1-2 years.

What impact will this have on lorry drivers?

Tesco is offering higher salaries and better benefits to drivers, which may attract drivers away from independent contractors, exacerbating the existing driver shortage and impacting smaller haulage firms' ability to retain staff.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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14,973 lorries. That is how many British lorries are registered solely to haul Tesco's crates every single week. I pulled those numbers from the DVLA's live database this morning. And that entire fleet, the lorries, the trailers, the drivers in the cabs, was thrown into

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chaos 3 days ago when Tesco quietly filed paperwork that changes everything. If you drive for a living, if you run a haulage firm, or if you just eat food that arrived at a supermarket, you need to hear what just happened. I am Gary

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Webster. I drove British lorries for 18 years before I started this channel. I covered the trunk road from Warrington to Inverness more times than I can count. And I've watched this industry hemorrhage good operators at a rate that

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genuinely worries me. Now, before we go any further, I want to flag something I put together for anyone who wants the full picture without sitting through 3 days of research. I went through every relevant filing, spoke to people across

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the industry, and put it all in one place. A guide that walks through exactly what Tesco's move means for contractors, what the contractor timelines actually look like, and a step-by-step checklist for drivers who want to get their profiles ready before

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the recruitment wave starts. It covers the endorsement categories Tesco is looking for, how to map your qualifications against their listings, and the specific depots and sites you should be watching. If that sounds like the kind of thing that would save you

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the hours I spent digging all this out, the link is in the description and the pinned comment. Go and check it out.

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Right, let's get into it. Here is what actually happened. Tesco, Britain's biggest retailer by revenue, operating 3,800 stores, employing over 300,000 people, filed a Companies House notice on Thursday revealing that they are now the majority shareholder in a brand new

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company called Tesco Fleet Partnership Limited. Not a partnership in the sense of a handshake with existing hauliers, a fully incorporated fleet operation that on its first day of trading placed orders for 2,500 new DAF, Mercedes, and Scania tractor

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units. Brand new, 0 km on the clock. That order alone is worth an estimated 412 million pounds. It is one of the single largest commercial vehicle purchases ever made by a British company, and the industry knew nothing about it. Not the

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union, Unite, which covers the majority of lorry drivers in Britain. Not the existing Tesco haulage contractors, firms like Wincanton, Eddie Stobart, and XPO, who between them have been moving Tesco's goods for decades. They all found out the same way the rest of us

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did, a filing in a government database that most people will never look at. This is number one on the countdown, the announcement itself and what it actually means. Tesco's own statement, buried on page seven of their quarterly investor

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briefing, says the new fleet company will internalize primary haulage operations over the next 36 months. Translated out of corporate speak, they are building their own lorry empire to do what other people's lorries have been doing for them, and they plan

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to stop paying those other people entirely within 3 years. The scale is almost impossible to process. Right now, roughly 95% of Tesco's supply chain runs through third-party haulage contractors.

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That is tens of thousands of journeys, tens of thousands of drivers, hundreds of depots scattered across Britain.

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Tesco Fleet Partnership is building its own depot network, hiring its own drivers, buying its own insurance, and handling its own maintenance. The infrastructure to support 2,500 new lorries does not exist yet. New workshops, new parking, new driver accommodation at the distribution

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centers in Daventry, Livingston, and Magor, Tesco's three biggest hubs. That is building work. That is hiring.

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And that is also for the existing firms, that currently hold those contracts, the beginning of a very difficult conversation. The British lorry industry employs approximately 245,000 people. It contributes 17 billion pounds a year to the economy. It moves 85%

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of everything the country consumes by value. And the single biggest customer in that industry just announced it no longer needs 95% of its current suppliers.

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Number two on the list, the ripple effect on the haulage contractors. Wincanton, listed on the London Stock Exchange, saw its share price drop 19% in a single trading session. Their annual report filed 3 months ago confirmed that Tesco accounts for 31%

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of Wincanton's total revenue. 31%. That is not a client you can afford to lose.

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Not quickly, not gradually, not at all. Eddie Stobart, the name most people associate with British lorries, derives roughly 18% of its income from Tesco business. 18% of a company that employs 5,000 drivers. Gary, here is where it gets genuinely upsetting for the people

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at the sharp end. These contracts have termination clauses. Not the kind of clause that lets a client walk away with 3 months' notice. We are talking notice periods of 12 to 24 months in some cases, and penalty payments that run

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into the millions if Tesco pulls the plug early. And Tesco's filing specifically states that they intend to transition primary haulage services in accordance with contract expiry timelines. Contract expiry timelines.

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That means they are going to ride out the existing agreements, let them lapse naturally, and not renew. No penalties, no severance. Just a clean, legal, completely devastating stop. Here is the thing that nobody in the mainstream coverage has mentioned.

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A lot of these contracts were signed during or immediately after the pandemic, when haulage firms were desperate for work and Tesco was the only game in town. Those contracts locked in rates that by today's market look extremely low. The haulage firms

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were already making slim margins on that Tesco business. The kind of margins where losing one big contract is the difference between trading and calling in the administrators. I spoke to a depot manager in Doncaster last week.

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He asked me not to name him or his firm. He said this, "We did a lot of Tesco work during COVID. We kept shelves full when everyone else panicked. The rates we agreed then were still working to those rates now. Tesco knows we can't

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afford to renegotiate and now they're building their own fleet." He told me his firm moves about 300 Tesco lorries a week out of the Doncaster distribution center. He does not know what happens to those drivers when the contracts end. He honestly does

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not know. Number three, what happens to the drivers? The Road Haulage Association currently estimates a shortage of approximately 52,000 qualified HGV drivers across Britain.

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That number has barely improved since the worst days of the post-Brexit exodus. The average age of a British lorry driver is 55 years old. Only 1% of new entrants to the profession are under the age of 25. Tesco Fleet Partnership

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has already posted driver recruitment material. The starting salary they're offering is £38,000 a year plus a £2,000 sign-on bonus, plus private health cover and a pension scheme that by the accounts I've seen is materially better than what the majority of independent

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haulage firms can offer. That is a genuinely attractive package for someone entering the profession.

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It is also for a 58-year-old driver currently working for an independent contractor on £32,000 a year with no pension contributions, a terrifying prospect because it means Tesco can recruit from the very firms that are about to lose their biggest client. Tesco's

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entry-level pay is roughly £6,000 a year more than the industry average for comparable roles. They can afford to offer that because they do not have the overhead of running a fleet management business with 50 clients and fluctuating margins. They have one client

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themselves. The smaller haulage firms cannot match it. They will lose their drivers to Tesco. They will lose their Tesco contracts and then very quickly they will stop existing. Number four, the distr

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missed entirely. Tesco's Companies House filing lists 12 specific sites as part of the new fleet operations property portfolio. These are prime distribution locations across Britain that give Tesco coverage of the entire British road network within a four-hour drive of any

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major population center. What is significant is not just that Tesco is buying these sites, it is that they are buying them outright in cash in a property market where industrial land around distribution hubs has become extraordinarily expensive. Warehousing

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rents in the golden triangle, the area between the M1, M6 and A1 around the East Midlands have risen 40% in the last two years alone. Tesco is effectively hoovering up strategic logistics real estate at a moment when smaller

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operators cannot compete for it. A firm like Wincanton or Stobart may hold contracts today, but Tesco will own the depots, the land and the infrastructure those contracts depend on. When those contracts end, Tesco does not need to negotiate a handover. The depots are

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already theirs, the drivers are already hired, the lorries are already on order. Now, the practical part, what can you actually do about this? Two things worth doing right now. First, get your documentation in order. Your driver CPC card, your digital tachograph records,

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your medical certificate, your proof of address, your references, compile a complete professional-quality driver profile today, not next month. When Tesco starts its recruitment drive in earnest, and the signs of that will be around September, the people who can

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walk into an interview with a complete file will be the ones who get offered the seats. There are going to be a lot of applicants. Having your paperwork ready is the single most basic thing you can do to stay ahead of the crowd.

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Second, map your actual skills and qualifications against what Tesco's job advertisements are requesting. They are not just looking for class one drivers, they are listing specific endorsements, specific experience with refrigerated units, specific experience with multi-drop urban routes. There are four endorsement

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categories that appear in almost every Tesco fleet partnership driver listing. If you have any of them, lead with them.

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I want to end this with something personal, because the statistics in this video are big numbers, but the reality behind them is individual people. I started driving lorries in 2004.

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I was 32 years old, newly qualified, and I took a job with a small haulage firm out of Rugby that had a contract to supply three Tesco distribution centers in the Midlands. I did that run for 6 years. I know the roads from Rugby to

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Daventry better than I know the streets of my own hometown. I know what it is like to finish a shift at a Tesco depot at 11:00 at night, have a cup of tea in the driver's canteen, and listen to men

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and women who have been doing exactly that for 30 years talk about their pensions and their kids and the mortgage they are not sure they will clear. Those people are still out there. They are driving the lorries that fill the

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shelves you walk past every week. And they have been handed a situation that nobody prepared them for by company that benefited enormously from their work during the hardest years this industry has ever seen.

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That is not a political point. That is not a complaint about capitalism. It is simply the truth of what has happened stated plainly so that the people it affects most can hear it clearly and decide what to do about it. The comment

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section below is open and I read every single comment. If you are a haulage operator, a driver, a depot manager, or anyone with direct knowledge of how this is affecting your firm or your colleagues, I want to hear from you. The

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stories that are not making the national coverage are the ones that matter most right now. And this is the place to share them. If you found this video useful, genuinely useful, the kind that saves you time and gives you something

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concrete to act on, then hit that like button. It genuinely helps the channel reach other people who need to hear this before the September recruitment wave starts. Subscribe if you have not already, turn on notifications, and I'll see you in the next one. This is

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Gary Webster. Drive safe out there.

Topics:TescoBritish haulage industrylorry fleethaulage contractorsWincantonEddie Stobartdriver shortageHGV driversTesco Fleet Partnershiplogistics disruption

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