David Cornwell, alias the well-known author John le Carr\u00e9, changed citizenship from British to Irish due to deep discontent with Brexit. The European maritime industry, based on the European mainland, to a large extent shares his dis-satisfaction.<\/p>\n
The European maritime sector has been forced to comply with new rules and regulations since the UK left Europe. Deltalinqs, the Rotterdam organisation of port and industry and the European Sea Ports Organisation (ESPO) voice the opinion of the majority when stating that being well prepared for Brexit offers no guarantee of achieving smooth trade between the EU and the UK. The day-to-day reality is that uncertainty about the impact of Brexit and the related rules and legislation still hamper smooth operations.<\/p>\n
Isabelle Ryckbost, Secretary-General, ESPO, hesitantly answers the question of whether British seaports and trade and industry were well prepared for Brexit. The key change is in adjusted documentation for the UK, typical of that between an EU member state and a so-called Third Country.<\/p>\n
\u201cAs yet, not everything is clear and we do not know exactly how some parts of the agreement will be implemented. Recently we had a meeting with the European Commission about the subject. However, Brexit remains Brexit\u201d, she says, adding that this does not change the business relations between ESPO and British seaports. \u201cThe British ports are observer members with us. They remain our business friends.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clearly, a lot remains to be done. Since the beginning of May the UK has implemented interim measures to keep trade moving between Britain and the Continent. Effectively, this is an acknowledgement that everything is not yet in place to achieve efficient post-Brexit operations.<\/p>\n
Secretary-General Ryckbost underlines the fact that flows of goods presently move fairly easy between the EU and the UK. It appears that shippers have anticipated the Brexit impact on altered Customs documentation and other areas of impact as a result of changes in rules and regulations.<\/p>\n
\u201cAt the end of 2020, warehouses were fully stocked to avoid all that. As a result, we saw a sharp decline in traffic via the ports of Zeebrugge and Dublin in January 2021. The question is, does the decline continue? As concerns UK-Ireland traffic, we see a partial shift of the volume from Dublin into the port to Belfast.\u201d<\/p>\n
It is not all doom and gloom in North European ports due to Brexit, however. Europe\u2019s leading port of Rotterdam registered an unexpected rise of 1.8% in ro-ro traffic to Great Britain in the first quarter of 2021. Nevertheless, significant challenges remain.<\/p>\n
NOT SMOOTH SAILING<\/strong><\/p>\n Edwin Kotylak, Manager Infrastructure, Accessibility and Border Control, Deltalinqs, underlines that doing business has not been smooth sailing. \u201cAlthough we have collaborated and trained with counterparts in the UK in the past few years to be ready for Brexit, it is a disappointment to observe that many delays since January could not be avoided. We regret to say that British trade and industry and public services have made many errors related to statutory import documentation. This has resulted in delays. It must also be said that Brexit documentation still requires a complex process run and as such a matter of continuous learning and training.\u201d<\/p>\n There is another worrying side effect; namely, maintaining a level playing field between the EU member states and Great Britain. Secretary-General Ryckbost draws attention to this when talking to Port Strategy<\/em>: \u201cThe level playing field is a major aspect to keep an eye on. The question is if the differences between the EU and UK trading will be large or not, and whether they will have an impact on trade flows.\u201d<\/p>\n Secretary-General Ryckbost also highlights as another area of challenge the Trans-European Network (TEN-T) and associated policies relating to the implementation of a Europe-wide network of railway lines, roads, inland waterways, maritime shipping routes, ports, airports and railroad terminals.<\/p>\n Brexit, she suggests, will have more impact on the EU policy on Core Network Corridors than foreseen. This policy is aimed to close multimodal gaps in designated Corridors, remove bottlenecks and technical barriers, as well as to strengthen social, economic and territorial cohesion in the EU. One of the nine Core Network Corridors is in Northwest Europe.<\/p>\n The basic question is will the European Commission and UK look into the Corridor part connecting the EU with the UK again? Achieving efficient maritime connections after the formal disconnect process, seems hard to achieve. Who would have thought it?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The view from Continental Europe of Brexit is of a complicated trading picture with plenty of challenges remaining. Janny Kok reports.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":1492,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-1491","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-europe"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1491"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1493,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1491\/revisions\/1493"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1492"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1491"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/greenport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=1491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}