The post you are reporting:
The UKBF slide (not a document I recognise) falls into 2 parts.
1. ‘The French will apply at least the legal minimum of third country customs controls on all goods and sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) checks on specified food and agricultural products. This includes the imposition of 100% customs documentation checks.’
The first sentence is factually correct; this is how trade from countries outside the Single Market is treated by Member States at the behest of the EU. It describes exactly what the UK currently does at Heathrow, Felixstowe and the like, whether the goods come from Canada, Turkey (despite their Customs Union with the EU) and so on. It will apply if no Withdrawal Agreement and/or Transition Period is agreed and in all bar one scenario after any Transition Period. The second sentence is more ambiguous but, depending on how you define ‘customs documentation’ and ‘checks’, accurately describes Dover Straits routes.
2. ‘The reasonable worst case scenario is that flow through the Short Straits is reduced to between 13% and 25% of current capacity for a period of between 3 – 6 months’ [and] ‘A "new normal" for cross-Channel freight will be 50-100% of current flows lasting "until significant changes are made to improve border arrangements such as automation”.’
This is an estimate of what a worst case scenario could look like. The slide does not say how the reduction to (not by) 13 – 25% is arrived at; perhaps UKBF has reasoned that the Straits routes currently cope with c.10% of trade being “3rd country”, so at a push let’s double it and add a pinch for luck. The slide also does not elaborate on what magical Tooth Fairy makes things better 3 – 6 months down the line.
Although I’m pleased that UKBF have realised that the French terminals (with the possible exception of Dunkerque) are, if anything, in a much worse position than the UK ones, I do think that the slide tends to over-do the gloom a tad. I suspect that most of our outbound traffic is not to France, but into/through it, and hence customs clearance will be performed further down the line. That does leave French checks on UK and Eire Transit declarations and EU export declarations but, were use of the former to be made mandatory, it is not beyond the wit of man for the UK to perform them on behalf of the EU once traffic is committed to the crossing.
Whether the estimate is right or wrong, it highlights the lunacy of marginally adding tonnage on cross-channel routes. Even if Dover/Cheriton ferries/shuttles cannot load or unload, simply adding the odd service elsewhere will only increase uplift capacity briefly – until that vessel can’t unload and reload either!
