FBJ 4 FREIGHT BUSINESS JOURNAL


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FBJ boasts the most informative and authoritative source of information with unrivalled in-depth knowledge of the rapidly changing freight business environment.


By Chris Lewis


We may be in the throes of the fi rst Christmas election that any of us can remember, but at least the freight industry can breathe a sigh of relief and continue the important work of preparing for Brexit. With the immediate threat of a crash-out from the EU removed, and with the politicians preoccupied with trying to get re-elected rather Brexit manoeuvring, it does put one in mind of one of those Christmas truces that used to take place in the trenches of World War 1. Still, we shouldn’t get too complacent. Expect whichever party (or parties) that emerges victorious on 12 December to mount a full-scale assault.


Speaking of wartime leaders, it was Churchill who famously said aſt er the Battle of Alamein that it was not the beginning of the end but merely the end of the beginning. One point well made by UK Warehousing Association boss Peter Ward, but which we have not – at least not yet – heard uttered by any politicians is that ‘getting Brexit done’ would be by no means the clean break and new beginning for the country that Leave enthusiasts would have us believe. As Mr Ward says, Brexit day would mark only the start of a long and painful process as the real process of extricating ourselves from the EU began. Boris Johnson may have promised that the transition period will not be extended under any circumstances to beyond December 2020, but then politicians’ promises are a rather debased currency these days.


There is at least one (literally) concrete result of Brexit – the Operation Brock measures on the M20 near the Channel Tunnel and ports, designed to create a holding area for trucks in the event of disruption to services. It means a permanent 30mph speed limit for trucks and 50mph for cars and is in eff ect a virtual guarantee of bottlenecks on what is at certain times of a day a very busy stretch of road. Maybe a metaphor for the country as a whole as Brexit looms.


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Elon Musk’s pronouncement that Europe’s fi rst major factory for electric cars would be in Germany, not the UK, has of course been seized on by the Remain faction as evidence of the evils of Brexit, indulging in a bit of ‘I told you so’ point-scoring. The Leave faction, meanwhile, suggests that there are other factors in play. And it is possible that it is a bit of politicking, though we have no idea of Mr Musk’s views on Brexit, if any. The reality is that business decisions are never entirely clear cut. Manufacturers take a whole host of factors into account when deciding where to site operations. Membership of the EU is an important, but not the only, criterion. But what can be said with some certainty is that the current excruciatingly long- drawn out Brexit process is hardly an encouragement to people planning multi- million pound investments.


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When is a freight forwarder not a freight forwarder? Perhaps when it evolves into a logistics company. This was a question we pondered aſt er a conversation with old- established company WE Deane, which says that it has increasingly moved from being a simple procurer of freight and customs services to a supply chain operator, with an impressive suit of clever soſt ware services to back up its claim. While customs clearance may become more of an issue in the short term aſt er the UK exits the EU, one feels that the real money these days is in managing companies’ oſt en extremely complex supply chains.


Considering the relatively small amount of money involved (in national terms) the government has got itself into a real pickle over ‘Brexit’ subsidies to ferry operators. The announcement ahead of the earlier Brexit deadline that it was planning to off er subventions to fi rms to provide extra capacity to certain operators triggered a chain of counter- and counter-counter-claims by Eurotunnel and other ferry operators that had been leſt out of the deal. Now the boss of Calais port has voiced his displeasure


As the defi nitive publication within the sea, air, road and rail freight sectors, each issue includes regular news and analysis, in-depth coverage discovering the business decisions behind the news stories, shipper and exporter reports, opinion, geographical features, political and environmental issues.


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Issue 8 2019 - Freight Business Journal From the Editor


///NEWS


FBJ is the only UK and one of the few pan-European Multimodal newspapers. The comments we have received prove there is still room for a hard copy publication within the freighting industry. You don’t have to look at a screen all day!


at the latest round of payments to operators on routes other than the Dover-Calais axis. Perhaps it’s lack of practice on the Government’s part. With the exception of some (but not all) local buses, rail passenger services and a handful of ferry routes in remote parts of Scotland, regular transport services in the UK seem to be able to operate without regular cash infusions, unlike much of the rest of Europe. Whether or not this is a good thing is a question for the politicians.


A rumour is circulating in some segments of the freight industry that the Government is planning to pull the plug on the replacement for HMRC’s Chief computer CDS – vehemently denied by people who should know, we hasten to add. It’s perhaps an indication of the febrile atmosphere in which we are all operating, coupled with growing distrust of offi cial announcements. But rest assured, our well informed contacts in the soſt ware world tell us that CDS has certainly not been dumped, and is still being developed and tested, ready for migration as planned early next year. The problem facing CDS is rather that, with the last entry into CHIEF scheduled to be at the end of September 2020, implementation will be a signifi cant challenge. Perhaps CDS may be delayed, but it is certainly not dead.


We’ve all grown up with technology that would have seemed the stuff of miracles – or black magic - to our parents’ generation. So it’s perhaps understandable the people assume that it will, one day, solve all our current-day insurmountable problems, including borders aſt er Brexit or detecting stowaways in cargo. However, as a spokesman for security tech fi rm Genetec points out, this would be a mistake. Computers cannot ‘think’ in the way that you or I can. They are not psychic. The Mark 1 Human Being is still needed to interpret the information they provide. What machines are good at is detecting patterns and anomalies in masses of data that would overwhelm a human brain. So they would be very good at selecting the 1% of loads passing through a busy port where, perhaps, the temperature or density of the cargo is not quite right. That 1% could still be a huge number, far too many to physically inspect, so decisions still need by knowledgeable people to be made based on years and decades of experience – which is where you and I come in.


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