I noted this in the Guardian:
Ministers have warned of 7,000 truck-long queues in Kent after the Brexit transition period ends as a worst-case scenario if hauliers fail to prepare for changes to customs rules.
The cabinet office minister, Michael Gove, who is responsible for no-deal planning, has written to logistics groups with the government's “reasonable worst-case scenario” planning, which warns of possible two-day delays for cargo travelling to France in January.
Let's ignore the buck-passing in this. After all, businesses cannot prepare because no one knows what the rules are as yet, the forms aren't ready, and nor are HMRC and that's because there is literally no deal right now, or any software to get used to as none has yet been trialled.
Instead, let's just consider what that means. If a truck takes up a length of 25 yards (which seems to be a fair estimate, and I'm working in yards as we're going to end up in miles) then 7,000 trucks is a queue of almost exactly 100 miles.
And people think our economy can survive that chaos?
And that trucking businesses can survive the cost of this?
Or that importers can bear this cost on top of tariffs?
Who is the government trying to kid?
We are heading for mayhem.
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The haulage business has known – and has been saying – this all along, since 2016. The Government chose to ignore them, and will probably do nothing while blaming everyone else – as always.
Few haulage firms will survive this chaos – in the UK at least. Perhaps the overseas firms will try to continue in spite of the lack of checks, paperwork etc – but why should they? Plenty of customers within Europe, and with no thanks – and probably delayed payment – for anything they might be kind enough to do for the UK.
The collapse of so many supply chains will lead to further large numbers becoming unemployed in early 2021.
And the media will trumpet whatever Johnson, Gove etc tell them to say. And the majority of the people, who’ve never been taught to think for themselves, will blame the EU, not the Government.
I knew we shouldn’t have come back to England from our holiday in Wales!
I reluctantly dragged myself over the border on Sunday….
The length of a HGV is 18 yards meaning 7,000 HGV will occupy 71.6 miles.
I allowed for gaps between them – I checked the data when doing the maths
Make the numbers easier , do it in metric and allow for distances…. call it 20m per truck.
7,000 trucks at 20m = 140,000m or 140km
Going Metric! Now that will REALLY annoy the Brexiteers!
🙂
Whichever you use it will result in an unsustainable situation and I can’t wait to see and hear the cries from the idiots that say remember what we did in the war?
I could have sworn Leavers promised frictionless trade and the easiest deal in history, or was I on strong substances at the time?
Richard,
I realise this is beside the point but I’m a nerd at heart…
According to the laws on vehicle lengths in the UK – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/maximum-length-of-vehicles-used-in-great-britain/maximum-length-of-vehicles-used-in-great-britain, the maximum size of an articulated lorry is 16.5m or 18m depending on the type of trailer. If you run the calculations (and ignore the fact that they’ll probably park them in rows) you’re looking at an effective queue of between 71 and 78 miles which, as luck would have it, would reach all the way from Dover to Big Ben.
Not quite 100 miles, but still a worrying number. Hopefully sanity will prevail and an extension will be sought but I’m not feeling that optimistic at the moment.
I allowed for 7m of space between them…..seriously. But maybe that was inappropriate
You only need a tail back to the M25 and the whole of the London and South East regions will be snarled up – 3,00 lorries?
In August 2017 the Department for Exiting the EU said ” The UK is implementing a new Customs declaration service which is on track to deliver by January 2019″ and in 2016 Mr Gove said that leaving the EU would mean we “would not have all the EU regulations that cost us £600m a week”.
I am sorry to say that I can only conclude we are governed by a bunch of outright liars.
Not just liars but a Light-In-The-Head Brigade government, fantasists if you like charging forward with very little in the way of foresight. This should all now be obvious by their repeated failure to grapple sensibly with containment of the Covid-19 pandemic. Clearly there’s an economic wake-up call on its way especially for the English!
No doubt they will stack the lorries on three or six lanes of a motorway, so that it “only” 30 or 15 miles, snaking across Kent.
If someone joining the back of a queue of 7,000 should expect get through within 2 days, they will be processing two or three per minute, 24 hours per day. Good luck with that! How many people do they have, and how much time does each one take?
The assumption is that once the queue is 7,000 it is stable
Why?
Perhaps I was unclear. I was making two points – first, the lorries won’t be lined up one behind the other in series across southern England – there will be several parallel lines.
Second, I was wondering how long people might have to wait, and how much work would be required to process the queue. The quotation says the reasonable worst-case scenario is a delay of two days. But that depends on the length of the queue, how long it takes to process each lorry, and how many people are doing the processing. For example, I’ve seen it reported that, at the moment, about 10,000 lorries pass through the Dover each day (presumably about 5,000 each way, so the 7,000 and two days makes some sense) and it takes about two minutes to process each one (which will increase with the new systems required).
I suspect it will require a fantastic amount of additional work just to stay at a steady state. You could wave them all through, or throw people at the job and clear the queue quicker and perhaps eliminate it. Or (as seems likely) you could find more people joining the queue than leaving, and the queue would get longer and longer.
Even so, on any meaningful measure, the queue be miles long and is likely to involve waiting several days. Not ideal for “just in time” deliveries or perishable goods.
Free trade will mean no trade in many cases
And exceptionally expensive trade at that
When asked “What do I buy?” my old American colleague used to say – “Canned food and ammunition” – to much laughter all round. No one is laughing now – either in the US or here.
But we’ll have freedom, Vera Lynn on the wireless and Spitfires overhead to let Johnny Foreigner know what he’s up against.
I think it has been suggested that a ‘new’ transition period could be agreed at the last minute – before end of October, but disguised as an ‘implementation period’ of a ‘thin’ new trade deal. But maybe the kamikazies … Patel/Bernard Jenkins/IDS etc would welcome a 100 mile queue?
I’ve had a thought related to all this Brexit balderdash. We know from the limited amount of details that emerge regarding the Tories funding that they are financed by billionaires (many of whom are from overseas)and we also know that the vote leave campaign was a cross border affair when it came to its financing. At the time of the Brexit vote TTIP was struggling to make headway through the European parliament, and it eventually fell. US and billionaire corporate types were, at the time, wetting themselves at the prospects of opening the entire EU space to the corporate rule the that the small print in the TTIP would have enforced. Now TTIP is dead, and we have the UK voiding a withdrawal agreement with the EU, over issues which come down broadly to standards, the same sort of issues that doomed TTIP.
We could be entering a situation where the UK, after exiting the EU, and signing a trade deal with the USA, then can force the EU s hand regarding accepting a new TTIP type deal as the NI border is the EU’s biggest weakness, one which Bojo and his ilk can use to hold the EU to ransom: either sign up to a new TTIP or face a flood of contraband chlorinated chicken & other US rubbish via NI.
The EU can’t leave the Rep of Ireland hung out to dry, or else it would face the wrath of the other many insignificant nations that make up its number, so it will have to reach some sort of agreement to keep Rep Ireland in the EU standards space. Those eventual negotiations could be what Bojo and his minders have in mind when breaking the withdrawal agreement.
I very much doubt that they are that clever.
It doesn’t matter, surely, whether the queue is 70 or 100 miles long. Even the most ardent brexiteer must realise that it’s not what we were promised.
Michael Gove – 2016 – The one thing which will not change is our ability to trade freely with Europe.
Michael Gove -2019 – There is no absolute guarantee that we would be able to export food to the EU.
That will take a few lorries off the road, if we are not exporting food to the EU.
Agreed
This was going to be the easiest deal Ever, remember?
Ah – the queue! Long ago, in life before Johnson, when this issue first began to get an airing, I vividly recall that the standard time expected for clearance of a single lorry with all its paperwork was anticipated to be between 2 minutes (GGT – ‘Gove guess time’) and 20 minutes (SET – standard EU customs time). – and some salty long distance drivers’ comments even suggested the latter was hopelessly optimistic. Anyway – the VMT (voter mean time) between these two estimates suggested that the queue, if single track, would stretch for 270 miles or just slightly longer than Leeds to Dover. Perhaps the CJG (Cummings/Johnson/Gove) solution is to use all the new lorry parks as a system of satelites which can gradually fill up as the whole show snarls to a halt – and then empties as the haulage firms go out of business. I knew the rhetoric about nowhere being left behind meant something.
Very good
I agree with 90% of your comment.
The bit I have misgivings with is
“The media will trumpet whatever Johnson, Gove etc tell them to”.
Shouldn’t that be
“Johnson, Gove etc will trumpet whatever the media tell them to”?
I was just thinking it was time to remake some of those old Ealing comedies. Passport to Kent, anyone?
Black humour is required…
Based on what information we have from the Government, which is very little of course, I have tried to put together what the no deal reality will look like from the first next year. So far I have the following.
1) Massive queues for trucks going out of the UK now confirmed, but could well be even longer given that having messed the EU about by breaking an international treaty, they may well be of a mind to check everything crossing their borders from country to country. I’m sure the French will not be keen to do the UK’s dirty work at the border, especially if there is no fishing deal, which leads to point 2.
2) French fishermen have already said that they will blockade ports in the event that there is no deal on fishing. I suspect they will get a lot of support from other unions across France and the EU. Ports elsewhere will probably be blockaded as well. I doubt whether police in the EU will want to be seen as doing the Brexiteers dirty work, so it will be light touch policing. Everything will quickly come to a standstill. The Tory Government will no doubt blame the EU with talk of the rule of law not being enforced, but hey, what you sow you shall reap. As openly being international law breakers, they are hardly in a position to attack others. Their credibility is bust.
3) Trucks coming into the UK will find an open door policy. Gove has effectivly said that they would be waved through and we know the border won’t be ready for at least 2-3 years. Given the UK’s failure on delivering big projects in the past, make that 5 years. Unfortunately, the open door policy won’t work as these trucks need to get back and they will be joining the 7 mile tailback, which will probably quickly be 10-15 mile depending on the checks on the other side, etc, etc. I doubt whether EU hauliers will be in a rush to come back.
Given what’s happened, the breakdown of trust that will come with no deal and the breaking of international law, I doubt the EU will be of a mind to do us any favours. The kid gloves will come off from the first next year. Let the pips tighten in Brexit Britain. No doubt we will be consoled by endless repeats of Dads Army.
We are not allowed an open door policy under WTO rules
Regardless of the length of queue, the underlying question is whether there is remotely enough capacity at Dover to process the number of lorries coming through. If the capacity available is less than that needed by the numbers of lorries arriving, that queue will keep growing ad infinitum.
For those into queuing theory, they do of course need to be able to keep the utilisation of the customs processing facilities below say 70-80% if the queues are to be kept down. I’d not be too confident that the thinking is that sophisticated.
Personally, I think a 100 mile queue would be a very good thing and I hope the lorry driving folk can ‘la manche’ their inner ‘Pierre’ and blockade the road network.
I note that Gove isn’t entirely void of detail – he has already highlighted that it is the EU that will be the problem.
He is a very clever man.
I wonder if Johnson, Gove, Cummings (et al) raise a toast to their own cleverness at the end of every day, of if they just heave a sigh if relief at having got through it.