The road freight transport sector has just wrapped up its twentieth national congress in Gijón with a warning that rings louder than a truck engine: there is a shortage of drivers, and if nothing is done, the problem will worsen in a few years.
Nearly seven hundred business owners gathered at the ‘Luis Adaro’ fairground took advantage of the session to make a clear request to the authorities: include these professionals in the catalogue of occupations that are hard to fill. This is no minor complaint. Behind it lie worrying figures: around nine percent of drivers will retire in the near future, and young people still do not see driving as a decent career path.
The Director General for Road Transport, Elena Atance, announced from the podium that the Ministry is already working on measures such as streamlining online training for the professional driving licence and facilitating the arrival of drivers from third countries. However, all speakers agreed that the solution requires something more basic: to dignify the profession and allow those men and women to return home with some regularity.
The president of CETM, Carmelo González, put his finger on an old sore: the gap between what transport actually contributes and how it is sometimes regulated or perceived. “Being essential obliges us, but also legitimises us to demand a stable framework,” he argued during one of the sessions. Alongside him, the president of the National Road Transport Committee, Javier Arnedo, rejected the label of an inflationary sector and recalled that a formula already exists to update the price of the service according to rises or falls in diesel prices. What they are asking for, he insisted, is not a privilege, but for shippers and the Administration to lend a hand in the face of ever-growing costs.
The AECOC representative, María Tena, backed the diagnosis: the pandemic proved that without trucks nothing works, and that hard‑won visibility should not be lost now.
Asturias used the congress as a showcase to try to place itself on the logistics map of the Northwest. The President of the Principality, Adrián Barbón, launched during the opening ceremony the idea of an institutional, social and business alliance that would place the region on the axis of the Atlantic Corridor. The local host, Ovidio de la Roza, president of Asetra CETM Asturias, described the event as “a milestone that demonstrates the maturity of a sector that never stops”. His message was simple and forceful: transport is much more than moving boxes; it sustains employment and the country’s competitiveness. That is why, he added, such gatherings serve to face challenges with unity and a voice firm enough to be heard.
One of the most talked‑about moments came from Ángela de Miguel, president of Cepyme. In her speech, she did not beat about the bush: “The SME is the great forgotten one of public policies in this country,” she stated. The figures she handles are striking: in recent years 15,000 small and medium‑sized enterprises have disappeared in Spain, suffocated by excessive bureaucracy, a fiscal pressure she describes as exorbitant, and a regulatory avalanche she considers impossible to comply with. “Every day 3.5 new rules are issued,” she warned. Despite everything, the business leader praised the resilience, creativity and innovation of a productive fabric that keeps going almost by inertia, although she warned that they cannot be expected to run at the same speed as large companies when they do not have the same resources.
The congress came to a close after several round tables and conferences, but the diagnosis remains on the table as an unwritten roadmap. The lack of drivers, generational turnover, working time controls, traffic restrictions and the need to reconcile family life with the road are issues that cannot wait. Transport entrepreneurs go home with the feeling that they have been listened to, but they know that applause does not fill trucks.
Now it is up to the Ministry, shippers and regional administrations to move from words to deeds. Meanwhile, the more than 700 congress delegates who gathered in Gijón trust that in two years’ time, at the next edition, the situation will have truly begun to change.