The construction of a new UK container terminal at Bathside Bay, Harwich is unlikely to start until at least the middle of the next decade, a seminar on port congestion has been told.
Paul Davey, Hutchison Ports (UK)'s head of corporate affairs, told the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers seminar at Felixstowe that the planning conditions set by the British government were "onerous", involving upgrading the A120 to Harwich.
"The permissions that are going to be needed to do that are going to take six to seven years from now to get to the stage of Transport and Works Act permission," he said. "So probably there will be no start to construction until the middle of the next decade - by which time we will have been working on it for 15 years."
Mr Davey said the UK planning system was a key factor in port congestion. Had HPUK's plans for the Felixstowe South expansion worked out as originally hoped, the facility would have opened by early summer - instead, construction had only just begun.
