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Issue 5 2021 - Freight Business Journal


Ports are engine of economic recovery


As well as keeping the country going during the long months of lockdown, Forth Ports has been keeping a close eye on post-Covid recovery, says chief operating officer Stuart Wallace. “Hats off to the guys who kept


everything working through the pandemic,” he says, pointing out also that Scotland’s largest ports group didn’t furlough any of its staff or make any redundant. Now, with cargo traffic well on its way to recovering to pre-Covid levels, several investments in new facilities are about to come to fruition, Stuart Wallace explains. Starting in the north, the £20


million upgrade of land and quayside at Dundee for the offshore wind sector continues, with a programme of investment due to finish mid-Summer. The east side of the port has been


completely redeveloped with a new ro ro quayside. The facility should be occupied, as planned either at the end of the year or early next year. Dundee’s traditional oil


and gas business hasn’t been forgotten, though, and the port has been developing a dedicated warehouse and logistics site for rig operator Valaris which operates a jack-up base in the port. Indeed, the facility will allow all such operations to be centred on Dundee, which at one point was handling seven rigs. Dundee is a microcosm


of what is happening in the Scottish energy sector, with oil and gas gradually giving way to renewables. At the moment, the former activity is still the majority in the port but


completion of the new development will probably


swing the pendulum the other way, says Stuart Wallace, although oil and gas work will remain very important for many years to come. Coming south, a much smaller


and very different location in the Forth Ports stable is Methil, where it is currently investing in a timber import facility. Timber is closely tied to the fortunes of the building industry, says Stuart Wallace, and there are “definite signs of recovery post-Covid”. The investment will allow


Methil to handle larger ships of around 3,500-4,000 tonnes. Some of the material, mostly imported from the Baltics, is treated at the port and it then goes to nearby manufacturers to be made into items such as roof trusses for the local market. “Methil has good links to the Central Belt of Scotland,” Stuart Wallace explains, adding that the investment is a reflection of Forth Ports’ commitment to smaller locations in its portfolio. Kirkcaldy and Burnt Island have


///SCOTLAND


thousand more square feet over the next few years. Meanwhile, the current 350,000sq ft of logistics space at Grangemouth handles traffic as diverse as bottles, foodstuffs, construction materials and mooring ropes. As well as being Scotland’s


already been the subject of recent investments, for example. Rosyth,


in However, every cloud has the shadow of


the famous bridges over the Firth of Forth, meanwhile “had an exceptional year” with


its Agri Hub going live


at the beginning of 2020 and handling large volumes. The additional cranes installed for the agri hub also helped with the handling of volumes of high- value decorative aggregates and the traffic helped offset the cancellation of all cruises in Scotland, which particularly affected Rosyth.


The facility will feature a heavy


liſt capability of up to 100 tonnes per square metre, backed up by 35 acres of adjacent land for logistics and marshalling.


This


Forth Ports has unveiled plans to create a £40million renewable energy hub at the Port of Leith in Edinburgh. Based around a new riverside marine berth, the 175 acre facility will be capable of hosting the world’s largest offshore wind construction vessels and will support the next generation of offshore wind developments in the North Sea.


BIFA members battle Brexit and Covid


Freight forwarders north of the Border are battling both Covid and EU exit, says regional BIFA consultant Len Hobbs. While some firms report a drop in activity, most seem to be surviving and are finding new ways of doing business to cope with the restrictions on face to face meetings, he reports. “We’re doing a lot of virtual


meetings, as well as phone calls,” he explains. Discussing complex issues can be harder by phone or internet than face to face; on the other hand, many people in the industry have got used to working from home and indeed enjoy it. The jury is out on whether the industry will see a rush back to the office when


and if restrictions are finally liſted in summer, says Mr Hobbs. As luck would have it, Brexit


has created one of the periods of greatest uncertainty and complexity in the freight industry at a time when the Covid pandemic has made face to face meetings impossible. At the time of writing in mid-May, BIFA members had just about got to grips with the first tranche of customs changes resulting from Brexit but, as Mr Hobbs says: “It’s not over yet. We still have safety and security and full import declarations to come – provided, of course, that they’re not kicked down the road again.” Meanwhile,


concerns over CDS, HMRC’s replacement for


the stalwart Chief computer, haven’t gone away either. Mr Hobbs’ hope is that HMRC will not try to implement CDS simultaneously with any major changes to customs procedures such as the introduction of UK import declarations from the EU. Some sectors of Scottish


industry have suffered particularly Brexit,


badly from especially seafood


exporters who have found that they cannot get their highly perishable products to market quickly and reliably enough now that there is a customs border to negotiate. Mr Hobbs says that both the EU and UK government are working on solutions.


will be supplemented by the upgrading of a 140 acre cargo handling site to accommodate lay down, assembly, supply chain and manufacturing opportunities. Forth Ports said the hub could


make a major contribution to Scotland achieving its 2045 net zero greenhouse gases target, spearhead Edinburgh’s and Scotland’s Covid-19 recovery plan and support up to 1,000 direct jobs and about 2,000 indirect jobs.


a silver lining and the cruise downturn did free up space for Rosyth to handle new traffic including an Irish Sea decommissioning job for Allseas which entailed storing a gasfield topside on a barge moored in the port. While Stuart Wallace


envisages that cruises will return, “there is no reason why we cannot continue to do decommissioning work.” Cruise ships keep to strict schedules, wind permitting, so other work can be timings either side of their calls. Grangemouth is arguably


the best known Scottish port in the group’s portfolio, and it is developing into a major multimodal hub for central Scotland. An extension to the rail sidings was recently completed, allowing Grangemouth to handle 750 metre trains – the longest on the national rail network – and an adjacent 100,000sq ft of logistics warehousing is now under construction. The space will probably be


filled almost as soon as it is completed but there is space to develop several hundred


Mammoet Ferry Transport drives


maximum efficiency


Being an asset-owner is a big advantage in serving the Scottish export market, says Mammoet Ferry Transport’s branch manager in Scotland, Calum Stewart. Moreover, one of Mammoet’s two UK bases is right in the heart of Scotlands Central Belt, at Cambuslang East of Glasgow, the other being at Runcorn. (The company is owned by Rotterdam Neele-Vat Logistics – see separate article in the Benelux report in this issue.) The trailer operator can give


a high degree of certainty to its customers North of the border that they have the capacity


and capability to ensure that consignments will be loaded and delivered on schedule; Reassuring in a market that has become beset with uncertainty in recent years with Brexit and, now, Covid19 leading to driver shortages and reduced equipment availability. “There are huge demands on


our drivers at the moment, so we’re constantly looking to maximise utilisation” Calum Stewart explains. For example, Mammoet can, if required, fill the leg between England and Scotland with domestic UK loads to help reduce the imbalance between imports and exports and ensure the right


busiest container port, the rail connection will make Grangemouth one of the country’s leading rail and multimodal hubs, Stuart Wallace points out. The


handling regular services to Aberdeen and others to Daventry and Tilbury could soon be reactivated. The rail link is electrified up to the dock boundary. Grangemouth is meanwhile


pressing on with what will be Scotland’s largest Border Control Post, despite the delay in introducing full import controls by the UK government. Forth Ports has worked very closely with Port Health to create a high quality facility and it will be a major factor in


Grangemouth, Stuart Wallace predicts. All


the regular container


operators into Grangemouth that took capacity out during the lockdowns are getting back to pre-Covid call levels and the port is working on further connections into Europe such as the Baltics. Regular services already operate to Antwerp, Rotterdam and Dunkirk. Forth Ports has invested in


three large ship to shore cranes and has increased container storage density at the port to cope with the increase in traffic.


number of trailers are available to fill the needs of our clients in Scotland. As in the rest of the UK, Brexit has


caused a fair degree of disruption to Scotland’s trade with Europe, and the problems have not gone away yet, he points out. Safety and security and veterinary and phytosanitary checks are due to be introduced on traffic moving into the UK (including Scotland), most likely on 1 January and the potential for delays puts even more pressure on operators like Mammoet Ferry Transport to keep their assets moving. The driver shortage is also


gripping the Scottish haulage market, as it is in the rest of the UK and indeed Europe. Many of the Eastern European drivers that took on UK work have returned


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rail hub is already


attracting new traffic to


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