The next-gen of freight celebrated at BIFA Freight Service Awards
Last week, the BIFA (British International Freight Association) announced the winners of its Freight Service ...
Supply chain operators are being warned not to get their hopes up of any imminent change in trading relations between the EU and the UK, as legislators in Brussels are trying to work out what the British government is seeking from a proposed “reset”.
Since the Labour party swept to power last July, the sense is that the UK has made “significant inroads” on restoring relations with its neighbouring trading bloc.
However, British Chamber of Commerce EU VP Peter Bell told The Loadstar today there was mounting frustration among Europeans.
“They are not being tongue-in-cheek, but Europe needs the UK government to lay out exactly what it is seeking from this ‘reset’. It wants the UK to detail its specific asks, because for Europe there is only one real ask and that is youth mobility,” he said.
“This whole ‘reset’ scenario is very idealistic and obviously in very early days, and it is still fraught with Brexit rhetoric on the UK side, with the sense in Brussels that the UK maybe isn’t certain what it wants.”
Mr Bell’s comments reflected the position of BIFA, said the association’s director general, Steve Parker, who said the “reset” had “so far been characterised by warm words on both sides, but very little detail about policy changes”.
And Mr Bell warned that, with delegations from Europe and the UK set to meet in May, “no one should be getting their hopes up”, stressing that the expectation was for the summit to serve as merely “scene setting”.
“In the meantime, though, I do not expect there to be any practical help for logistics and supply chain operators, and there is a sense that you will have a protracted process in which nothing is agreed until everything is agreed – it’ll be horse trading,” he added.
Mr Bell said the key for supply chains was to cut red tape to improve trade facilitation between the UK and EU, and urged legislators to look to help “particularly SMEs”, which he said had borne the brunt of post-Brexit changes.
Mr Parker said while both the EU and the UK remained committed to full implementation of the current trade and cooperation agreement, “there doesn’t seem any appetite to implement any significant changes, particularly relating to frontier processes”.
He added: “In a way, this is not surprising, as considerable effort and cost has been incurred to implement new procedures, and time is still required to establish how well they will actually work in practice.”
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