Brexit taking NI economy back to the 80s – hauliers
HAULIERS in Northern Ireland are asking for further optouts on Brexit checks that they say are crippling the industry.
They told a Stormont committee yesterday that delays at Dublin Port, backlogs in UK warehouses and a lack of trained customs officials is costing them time, money and staff.
“We’re back to the Dark Ages of the 1980s in Northern Ireland here,” said Paul Jackson of McBurney Transport, which serves major supermarkets and retailers across Ireland and the UK.
John Martin, policy manager at the UK’s Road Haulage Association, said trucks were being delayed in Dublin for
“not only hours but days” and that the sector is now “haemorrhaging staff ”.
Despite a grace period on food supplies to Northern Ireland, there have been some shortages on supermarket shelves, hauliers said.
They told the Northern Ireland Assembly’s infrastructure committee on Wednesday that they need an extension to the grace period beyond 31 March, the deadline agreed with the EU.
“Nobody is going to starve in this country, thank God. That era is gone,” said Chris Slowey, managing director of Portadown-based Manfreight Ltd. “But we don’t have the same availability.”
Aodhán Michael Connolly, director of the Northern Ireland Retail Consortium, said the shortages were also down to “choice issues” during lockdown and affected “only a couple of hundred items out of 40,000” product lines.
“The supply chain is not and has never been a few days away from collapse,” Mr Connolly told the committee.
The most pressing issue for hauliers is that they are able to export goods to the UK but refill trailers when they get there, which is unprofitable.
Darryl Morgan of Morgan McLernon Refrigerated Transport said he shipped home 100 empty trailers in the first two weeks of the year.
Hauliers are caught in the middle as UK exporters get to grips with the increased paperwork brought about by Brexit, leaving many logistics companies having to process customs forms themselves.
Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Brandon Lewis told the committee that the government was not looking at extending the 31 March deadline.
Democratic Unionist MP Ian Paisley Jr said “the first 20 days of January have been an unmitigated disaster”.