I am not sure a National Audit Office report on the Department of Transport is standard holiday reading. But in the light of my comments on the potential for traffic issues to create crippling cash flow issues for UK business this one could not pass me by, and is out today.
These are the issues thatDepartmentnment for Transport is working on with regard to Brexit:
And this is the state of progress:
And this is the state of progress:
Note that as yet they have no idea what to do about borders.
And the only way to control the problems at Dover is to turn the M20 into a giant car park on a scale not previously imagined, with consequent transport chaos.
Maybe 7 million new driving licences are required. No one knows if they will be available by 29 March.
Or if UK lorry trailers will be allowed on the continent then.
Or if planes really will fly.
Am I right to predict chaos, when all this is dependent on a Department with an appalling track record? I think so. I strongly suspect the NAO shares the view, overall. As they say:
In essence, the NAO are saying that the official DExEU line is hopelessly optimistic; that the reality is nothing is safely on track for delivery; the border issue is being ignored and quite a lot is causing concern. What is more, the NAO imply they think this assessment too optimistic.
It's not looking good.
I stick by my forecast of chaos.
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“The Department of Transport is not on track”. Ah, Perhaps it should reopen the Great Central Line.
The GC was a truly far-seeing company, and built its London extension to continental loading gauge, in expectation of through trains to Europe one day.
How fitting then, that BR should have run it down and shut most of it. BR was obviously another organisation ahead of its time…
Is my cynicism of the current day coming through as clearly as I’d like it to be??
And Robinson built some amazingly good looking engines
Just ignore the indifferent (at best) 4-6-0s
Relax. Nothing is under control (Zen saying) 😉 😉
It’s a shame that some of this hadn’t been flagged up two years ago. In fact it’s an even greater shame that it wasn’t flagged up before the referendum.
The cupboard is bare.
Hasis everybody gone on holiday?
Well at least we can rename the port of Dover.
How about ‘Clusterfuck’?
Heathrow can become ‘Heath – No’
Stansted will be ‘Standstill’.
But seriously this is really bad. I’ve been in my brother’s lorry through most of our ports in the 1990’s and they are congested enough as it is but they keep moving 24/7. I just cannot see how this will work without a customs union.
In the 1990’s I remember a journey into the snowy German/Czech border (I remember jumping out the cab into snow that was up to my waist) and the long queues of lorries and men from East European states who were not yet in the Union – every conceivable East/Central European nationality was there in the queues waiting for their vehicles to be checked – it was fascinating to witness such a rich variety of ethnicity but excruciating to watch as it took so long.
Simon Jenkins in The Guardian thinks it’s a non event. He didn’t say it but his article made me think of all the scaremongering in 1999 about the Millenium Bug.
He writes solely from a British perspective.
Which is rather silly. Even if we pretended nothing had happened the EU will not. They cannot afford to do so or their rules amount to nothing.
To put it another way, Jenkins is wrong.
We’ll see. I certainly think Jenkins is wrongheaded in his opinions on the teaching of maths but he doesn’t tend to be a Chicken Licken. Time will tell.
One of my worries is that in our society, people’s expectations are being wound down all of the time to something that is very low.
This lowering of expectations (for example wages, job longevity, the health service, care for our elders) seems to me mean that we are becoming more accepting of a poorer quality of life in this country.
So BREXIT may well be a mess but it may just mean ‘mess’ is the new normal.
I’d like to think as much work is going into preparing for brexit as went into preparation for Y2K, but I cannot.
There we have it. If people are warned about a risk, and steps are taken to address and largely prevent it having the impact it might have had, they think it never existed in the first place.
If identified risks are ignored, and measures to address them are weakened or ignored, you end up with a block of flats going up in flames, or indeed contagion causing a global financial crisis.
Because of course government policy is that everything will be milk and honey in the sunlit uplands of Brexit. The UK being such a unique and exceptional country just has to demand cake and it magically appears.
There was no catastrophe in Y2K precisely because the threat was recognised early on and carefully and fully prepared for. Disaster was averted. Megacongestion at Dover etc is anticipated, but nobody in Britain is doing anywhere near enough to prepare for that moment when the faecal matter collides with the air cooling system. Thee will be chaos.
But it will all be the fault of the EU.
The nightmare is that whatever happens and goes wrong it will be entirely blamed on the EU / not negotiating the right sort of Brexit.
And the worse thing is is that probably 50 % of the population will believe it.
RE: Robinson loco’s.
Sorry – I beg to differ. To me Robinson’s loco’s were uniformly ugly although I understand that they were very reliable and could have soldiered on forever.
Henry Fowler was a much better designer of smaller locomotives. His 4-4-0 compounds knocked the spots off Robinson’s Director class in my view.
The big loss though was the GC. It had a generous loading gauge that could have taken European gauge trains and was effectively a modern railway built for point to point speed.
What shortsightedness!
Oh! Contentious.
And a 4F v a ROD? Is there a debate.
But I wholeheartedly agree re the loss of the GC route – it was madness