london the supply chain troubles caused by brexit and the pandemic have been so bad for satyan patel that the shelves at his convenience store in central london are seriously lacking water and soft drinkslast week i ran out of cocacola i havent had large bottles of evian for three weeks said patelwithout products theres no business with empty shelves like this no one is going to come in the shop anyway he addeda wide range of businesses have suffered through shortages for several months in the uk from milkshakes at mcdonalds to beer at a pub chain to mattresses at ikeabut shoppers are also facing empty shelves for things as basic as water and milk at uk supermarkets and grocery storesthe coronavirus crisis has severely disrupted the global supply chain but britains divorce from the european union late last year has exacerbated the problem in the ukshops are not getting products delivered to them as rules making it harder to hire eu citizens has left haulage companies with a drastic shortage of lorry driversmany people who returned to their home countries from britain during the lockdown have not returnedcoop a cooperative supermarket group said it was impacted by some patchy distribution to its deliveries but it was working with suppliers to restock quicklythe group said it was recruiting 3000 temporary workers to keep depots working to capacity and stores stocked as quickly as possibleaccording to recent estimates the uk currently faces a shortage of about 100000 lorry driverswe had already decided to reduce our stock because of covid but now were finding it hard to get some products as well because theyre just not available patel saidat a supermarket near his store the soft drinks aisle was a little short of bottles and cans but other shelves were fullbut 22yearold sales assistant toma said the situation was grimwe dont have stock we have nothing in our warehouse said toma who declined to give her last namewe have gaps everywhere she said sometimes we receive only a certain amount of some products we dont even have waterthe shortages began when the pandemic hit and got worse after brexit came into force on january 1 toma saidsome customers complain to supermarket staff and say its us to blame she addedat another major supermarket in southeast london water bottles were sparse and milk was missing from shelvesfrozenfood group iceland and retail giant tesco have warned of christmas shortagesiceland head richard walker said the company has reduced deliveries as it has 100 fewer drivers than it needsevery day we are missing around 10 percent of the stock we have ordered into our depots he wrote in a blog adding that when things were at their worst its sole bread supplier was unable to deliver to as many as 130 stores per dayshortages of goods in the uk will probably last for a while and may even intensify further according to a note by capital economics a research consultancya report this week from