Trade Bill — House of Lords, 2019-01-30
Topic: Transportation
Jennifer Elizabeth Randerson (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, I start by craving the indulgence of the Committee and offering an apology for the fact that I missed the start of the speech of the noble Lord, Lord McNichol. I was racing back from Cardiff, but noble Lords will know that that involves the Great Western Railway. The train was only a few minutes late but that was the time I needed in order to hear the beginning of the noble Lord’s speech I have three amendments in this group, all designed to ensure that we try to keep the transport system running as normally and smoothly as possible after Brexit. I will start with Amendment 41, which relates to road haulage. We have heard the story many times about the dangers to our road haulage system. Indeed, last week the leaked Border Force document estimated that there could be a decline of up to 87% for three to six months after a no-deal Brexit if some arrangements were not put in place. We have had the preparation for the ECMT certificates that would have to come into place if we had no deal: roughly 1,200 certificates for a haulage industry that involves 30,000-plus hauliers. Clearly, this is totally inadequate. We have had the fiasco of the ferry-less ferry services to try to smooth the process We have talked many times in this House about Dover, but I want to say a word about Holyhead, the second-largest roll-on roll-off ferry port in Britain. Some 500 lorries per night go through Holyhead—that is three miles of queues, and the route to the port is through the town. In other words, any kind of queuing system caused by a no-deal Brexit would make it impossible for the town to function. I have had meetings with representatives of the Road Haulage Association, who have alarmed me with some information about the way in which the modern haulage industry works. They pointed out to me that an Amazon lorry can have 8,000 individual shipments on it, which—if we do not have arrangements in place—could lead to an individual customs declaration in each of those 8,000 cases. Each customs declaration has 36 different fields that have to be completed. They estimated that it would take 170 staff one day’s worth of work to deal with one lorry. We all know that Amazon will adapt, but it cannot adapt in two months There are numerous other cases and examples of the disruption that no deal would bring, so in this amendment I seek to ensure, in relation to road haulage, that we do not have no deal and keep the arrangements as close as possible to what we have now. We should bear in mind—I was told this by a representative of the freight industry—that it is in what it describes as a huge hole. They said, "The moment we do not apply the rules, we lose control of the border". So it is no good for our Government to say that we will not do the checks and will take it on trust. The point the freight industry is making is that the moment we start taking things on trust, without the checks, we will have serious problems In Amendment 57 we move on to aviation. Many noble Lords will recall that last week the airlines came in for criticism because they had been selling tickets without drawing attention to the fact that, if there is no deal and we leave on 29 March without any arrangements, they felt that those tickets might not necessarily be honoured. That was the criticism and yet the Government have claimed that the aviation situation is arranged and organised.