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Some 4,000 trucks and thousands more small vans are now waiting to cross the English Channel after a two-day French ban on the arrival of goods from the UK, and food transport companies are warning that potential levels of disruption now they oscillate between “a disaster and a catastrophe”. just as January looms and the end of the Brexit transition.
Representatives from the Food and Beverage Federation and the Road Transportation Association (RHA) told MPs on Tuesday that the hundreds of trucks queuing on the M20 towards the Port of Dover, and in a temporary parking lot at the airport in Manston in Kent, they were only one part. of the problem. Many more vehicles, they said, were parked elsewhere in Kent or waiting to exit factories and warehouses.
Roger Gough, the head of the Kent council, told the BBC that about 3,000 vehicles were being held: 632 at the M20 and another 2,220 at Manston.
If the vehicles were unable to return to France, haulers warned, there would be a transport shortage to pick up fresh produce from the mainland and return to the UK in time to refill the shelves after Christmas. The queues could reach 7,000 vehicles, they added.
The UK government was still trying to unblock the ban, which was imposed by Paris in an effort to contain the spread of a new variant of the coronavirus, as talks about a post-Brexit trade deal boil down to the wire.
Industry insiders said the government was preparing to establish a Covid testing facility in Manston in an attempt to unlock the lockdown.
Retailers warned on Tuesday that vehicles should start moving in 24 hours or there would be a shortage of fresh produce such as lettuce, tomatoes, citrus, berries and cauliflower in stores starting Dec. 27.
The trade body of the British Retail Consortium said it had told the government that “there was no alternative to reopening the Canal ports as it is a key supply route for fresh produce at this time of year.”
While some fresh food shelves could look empty in the coming days, retailers urged shoppers not to panic when shopping. They said there would still be plenty of food as traditional Christmas foods such as potatoes, carrots, Brussels sprouts and parnsips were grown primarily in the UK and there were a lot of long-lasting products such as canned and packaged foods.
However, representatives of the food industry said if the French ban continued it would affect preparations for the end of the Brexit transition scheduled for December 31. The industry had planned to use the week between Christmas Day and New Year’s Day to build up stocks of fresh food and other products in the event of any disruption caused by changes in the terms of trade with the EU.
At a special business selection committee hearing, Duncan Buchanan, the RHA’s policy director, warned that the government was complacent about mounting problems and was making “big assumptions about readiness” for Brexit.
He said the government’s suggestion that only a small proportion of the goods were imported through France was “ruling out the magnitude of the problem.” The transport industry says that a large proportion of fresh food is brought in by truck from Calais at this time of year.
“This issue is going to be significant,” Buchanan said. “In January a place between chaos and catastrophe looms, and everything I have seen in the last 24, 48 hours leads me to think that we are going to be in a bad position.
“The problem is that we do not know exactly what products will be in short supply, what will not happen correctly, and which factories will not be able to make what they produce.”
Ian Wright, CEO of FDF, said the Dover outage was a “small glimpse of what could happen in the first days and weeks of the end of the transition period and that would be compounded by tariffs and no deal.”
He added that “this kind of chaos” would be “totally possible” in several UK ports exporting and importing from the EU next year.
Concerns about fresh food imports were accompanied by concerns about exports, particularly Scottish seafood destined for festive festivals in Spain.
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Wright said the companies’ insurance policies would not cover lost stocks and asked the government to compensate companies affected for delayed deliveries, which could lead to millions of pounds of salmon, prawns and seafood.
Scotland Food & Drink CEO James Withers said that even if a protocol for cargo movements were agreed on Tuesday, it would already be too late for most Christmas orders.
“For some of our seafood exporters, pre-Christmas sales have been ruined. It seems an impossible mission to get products to the great markets of Spain that are held tomorrow. That is an unrecoverable loss of revenue and I fear this will be a fatal blow to some of the smaller companies after the horrendous year they have already had, “said Withers.
