Logistics firms are yet to see any trade flow improvements with Europe, eight months after the government announced its ‘EU reset’, and they find it easier supplying food from the UK to Northern Ireland via the circuitous Dublin route, MPs have heard.
While negotiations on a new Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) agreement with the EU as part of the reset were “obviously welcome”, there was not enough focus on logistics and “the service that gets the goods to move”, said Alastair Gunn, trade policy lead for the Road Haulage Association, in a Commons Business and Trade Committee hearing this week.
The detail within the negotiations “may work for [agrifood] traders, but it also has to work for us. There’s not that much in the reset that is focused on the challenge for logistics”, he added, in the committee’s first hearing of an inquiry into trade with the US, India and the EU on Tuesday.
“Both the European Commission and the UK government need to understand there are frictions that are borne within the logistics sector, and costs that we pass on to our customers where we can, [but] some that are absorbed by lower margins.”
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It was “fantastic” to hear Keir Starmer’s announcement that a new SPS deal would be implemented last May, added Toby Ovens, MD of logistics firm Broughton Transport.
However, hauliers “had seen no benefit” from it to date, he added, citing ongoing issues around paperwork such as export health certificates and the often-differing and exact interpretation of them on the continent.
Ovens described the run-up to the festive period, when a number of UK lorries carrying meat exports were held up for days or weeks on end at French border posts due to onerous border bureaucracy and paperwork issues, as “pure hell”.
Post-Brexit border issues had led to a significant contraction in the number of logistics companies exporting meat to the EU, Ovens pointed out.
Asked by committee chair Liam Byrne MP “how are you still in business?”, Ovens quipped he had “lost a lot of hair over the last few years”, adding “it is a real challenge, it’s nothing like it used to be”.
And in the case of shipping goods to Northern Ireland, given the ongoing issues with the Windsor Framework, the RHA’s Gunn said it was currently “easier to move goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland via Dublin” and then to Northern Ireland by road, than it was across the Irish Sea from Scotland.
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“That is strange, that to go from the UK to the UK it’s best to go through an EU country. And in the context of how difficult it is to move goods into the EU – that’s still easier,” he added. “That suggests that there’s quite a radical solution required.”
Ovens’ and Gunn’s comments come as FDF research published just before Christmas revealed food and drink trade with the EU down by a quarter on pre-Brexit levels.
However, NFU president Tom Bradshaw told the committee food and drink trade volumes with the EU had actually fallen by closer to 35%.
“Reducing friction at border is in everybody’s interest,” he said, though he warned the divergence between UK and EU food systems post-Brexit meant there were also significant challenges facing SPS negotiations.
There was a need for “carve-outs” in areas such as gene editing, where the UK had pressed ahead, if UK producers were to gain anything from the new regulatory regime, Bradshaw urged.
Talks are ongoing between the UK and the EU over the finer details of the SPS deal. It comes amid media reports in recent days that EU officials are calling for a ‘Farage Clause’ to protect the bloc from a potential Reform UK or Conservative government after the next elections, with stiff financial penalties for the UK were it to pull out of the reset agreement.
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