Neil Pizzey, managing director at Amazon Filters, a Surrey-based manufacturer with more than 30 years’ experience of selling fluid filtration products into the EU, has had first-hand experience of the new rules.
“If you were sending a full lorry-load of only your own product and you were in control of the clearance, then it would get through in a week. The problem was on consolidated shipments,” he says.
industries such as automotive are changing rapidly and pivoting towards electric vehicles. That means rebuilding the supply chain and an emphasis on battery manufacturing.
“There is part in the deal which says that by the end of 2026, for all battery electric vehicles, the battery has got to be made in the UK or the EU,” he says.
“It’s really mission critical now that the UK gets big investment into battery manufacturing otherwise the batteries will be made in the EU. If they are made there, the cars will be made there because batteries are heavy to move about.”
McReynolds highlights two critical issues that will impact further down the road – market regulation and business mobility.
“Manufacturers have additional responsibilities, legal representation in both markets is required, and that means they’ve got additional costs to service those two markets from a regulatory perspective,” he says. “The challenge is how we manage divergence.”
Neil Pizzey
Neil Pizzey has had first-hand experience of the new rules.
“From being able to export consolidated palletised goods in a three-to-four-day transit time from the UK to arrival at the customer, on 1 January, the major freight forwarders had no preparation for the additional requirements on them and those lead times went up to as long as five or six weeks.”
Pizzey adds that their documentation wasn’t the issue. EU customs didn’t have the capacity to clear the goods.
“All the big freight forwarding depots [in the EU] got full, so they had to park the trailers outside on the road,” he continues.
“It was almost impossible to know where your goods were and therefore when they would arrive, when they would clear or why they wouldn’t clear.”
Six months on, transit deliveries are back to what he would call acceptable times, having reduced to one or two weeks, but are still longer than before.
Rapid changes creating investment priority
For Bailey, a longer-term issue is how good the TCA deal is. He argues there are question marks around big-scale investments which are critical because some
On 1 January 2021, UK laws reflected those in the EU but the trading block has continued to legislate, so there is already some divergence.
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