NI protocol ‘has driven our road haulage back to the Dark Ages’
Transport boss in the business for 40 years tells Stormont committee it’s his worst time ever
A HAULIER has said the business has returned to the “Dark Ages” as a result of new complexities following Brexit and the Northern Ireland Protocol.
The arrangement has introduced new checks and paperwork on goods coming into here from Great Britain.
Delays at ports on the other side of the Irish Sea, combined with a Covid-19 slowdown in imports from the continent in December, have led to gaps on supermarket shelves here.
Speaking to the Infrastructure Committee, Paul Jackson of Mcburney Transport said: “I’ve just had my 40th Christmas in the haulage business and it has been the worst ever period in my life in preparation for Brexit, never mind the Covid situation from March last year.”
He said that when starting out in the industry in the early 1980s he had travelled to Co Louth and Newry with customs forms on a regular basis but that the present regime was much worse.
Seamus Leheny of trade group Logistics UK said the situation was “not sustainable”.
While lorries were able to leave Northern Ireland with goods for Great Britain, some were having to come back empty at the freight companies’ own expense due to a lack of preparedness among firms in Great Britain for sending goods here under the new requirements.
But Aodhan Connolly of the NI Retail Consortium said warnings earlier this month that the supply chain was “days away from collapse” had been “reckless”.
He said: “There have been some choice issues but this has to be kept in context. The average large supermarket will have from 40,000 to 50,000 product lines, there’s only ever been a few hundred missing, and that picture is getting better.
“We have seen in the past lockdown, people buy stuff that they can cook at home and freeze, and they stock up. So for example, so far in January, we’ve got a 30% uplift in the amounts of mince that people are buying.”
Mr Leheny said companies needed a further grace period on checks — and that a cliff-edge needed to be avoided on consumers’ parcels. Parcels being sent from businesses to consumers are subject to a grace period until the end of March.
The government has set up a Trader Support Service to give assistance with the new regime — and Mr Leheny said 30,000 firms had signed up to it.
He said that lockdown and the closure of non-essential retail meant that items such as white goods were not crossing the Irish Sea in the usual amounts. But he warned: “As we come out of lockdown that volume is going to increase and our industry is going to need all the help it can get to service the economy.”
Mr Jackson said crossings from Belfast were working more smoothly than those from Dublin, where a full regime of EU checks is in place.
“Belfast is running smoother in comparison but not if you compare it to where it was in December and 40 years previously .... we are back to the Dark Ages.”
SDLP MP Claire Hanna raised the issue of port movements between GB and Northern Ireland at Prime Minister’s Questions.
Boris Johnson said “actually there’s more transit now taking place between Larne and Stranraer and Cairnryan than there is between Holyhead and Dublin because it’s going so smoothly”.
However, many Irish hauliers are bypassing routes to Great Britain and instead travelling directly to France using crossings such as Rosslare to Cherbourg. Last week Stena Line moved a new ferry intended for Belfast to Liverpool onto the Rosslare route.
‘As we come out of lockdown the volume is going to increase and our industry is going to need all the help it can get’