London, UK: For the 47 years since the UK has been part of the European Union trade has been easy. Few operators have any experience of anything other than loading the truck and worrying about the schedule for meeting a continental delivery slot.
Come 1 January all this ends and while drivers will not have reams of paperwork to present they will have as much red tape, albeit in electronic form. Except the software to handle all these electronic documents is not ready.
The freight industry has a long and successful track record using electronic “paperwork”. Forty years ago freight forwarders were the leaders in electronic data interchange, then a novelty for most non-freight business.
The haulage industry is no stranger to telematics and sophisticated routing and scheduling packages despite its ‘big trucks driven by burly men’ image so popular with newspapers.
There has been a stark warning to government from the Association of Freight Software Suppliers which says its members “cannot guarantee” everything will be ready in time for the end of the Brexit transition period.
For the bulk of UK-EU trade across the English Channel, and the now hundreds of millions of declarations required, the government will use a updated version of an older system, called Chief. For the cross-Irish Sea trade, the demands of the Northern Ireland Protocol mean that a new system, called Customs Declaration Service, needs to be used to cope with two different tariffs on goods and provide the necessary trade surveillance data to the EU. This is now required even for trade within the UK such as goods from England to a Northern Ireland customer.
Some of the biggest retailers in the UK say privately that they will not be able to get this to work in time, according to the BBC. Retailers will meet cabinet ministers Michael Gove and Brandon Lewis today to discuss the issue. Although the government says its software is ready, the software developers in the industry say the systems as a whole are not, and now will not be ready in time for 1 January. This is not news: they have been saying this for most of the year. Testing systems such as this, where no previous declarations were required, would normally take three to six months, they say.
As soon as the government ruled out extending the transition phase in June, concerns were expressed that a properly tested system would not be possible by 1 January. This was the case because the details of trading arrangements were still being negotiated, while many businesses were already in pandemic-related difficulties. In addition, there are now new systems requiring hauliers to input trade data merely to access Kent’s motorways.
HMRC has had to take on the extraordinary task of creating a rolling series of business pandemic rescue schemes at exactly the same time as creating two new different borders for goods trade across the Channel and Irish Sea.
The government has been very quick to try and shift the blame for its disastrous Brexit policy onto business but when it comes to electronic data, haulage is an industry with a long track record of success. It’s government inept negotiation and policies that will cause the myriad problems come January, not the haulage industry,
