Trucks are backed up as far as the eye can see on the M20 highway in Great Britain, as their drivers wait to get to the Port of Dover and onward to Calais, in France. A complicated, summer-long crisis over immigration and striking French ferry workers has restricted access to seaports and the Channel Tunnel, forcing many shippers on both sides to turn to costly air cargo options to get their goods across the English Channel.
The protests have disrupted MyFerryLink, the passenger and freight ferry service across the channel, which has caused supply chain delays for European manufacturers. As a result, U.K.-based logistics firm Priority Freight has received a 300 percent increase in airfreight bookings, moving cargo that otherwise would have been delivered by trucks said Neal Williams, group managing director at Priority Freight. Additionally, consolidated shipments that would have moved by truck increased large aircraft charters by 600 percent in July. Although airfreight costs more, in this case it’s saving manufacturers’ money by circumventing long delays, Williams said.
As busy as the port was earlier this summer, demand for emergency logistics didn’t reach crisis proportions until “Operation Stack” was implemented June 24. Operation Stack is an emergency procedure used by police in the English county of Kent and the Port of Dover that forces trucks to park along the sides of the M20 highway through Kent, when services across the channel are disrupted.
“We estimate that emergency logistics can prevent losses of more than £1 million [US$1.6 million] per hour for car manufacturers, by keeping production lines running during periods of disruption,” Williams said . “August is traditionally the quietest manufacturing period of the year, when U.K. plants cease production for a few weeks. We anticipate that if the disruption continues into autumn and beyond, once production starts again, there will be a significantly higher cost to the U.K. supply chain.”
Williams also cited figures from the Freight Transport Association, which estimated that this summer’s troubles have cost the freight hauling industry about $387.9 million.
Now, the government of England is proposing to use the mothballed Manston Airport as a temporary truck lot when Operation Stack is in place, but Williams said that will just move the disruption and road congestion to east Kent, and will not provide enough capacity to accommodate the number of trucks parked on the M20, as seen in July.
In addition to the shipping and labor issues, there is the problem of migrants coming from as far away as North Africa and the Middle East, who try nightly to scale fences to enter Great Britain. According to Reuters, British Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to cut net annual migration from hundreds of thousands of people to tens of thousands, but has so far missed his mark. Migrants have been seen clinging to the tops of freight trucks.
“The problems don’t begin and end in Kent, or Calais, it’s the crises that necessitate Operation Stack in the first place that need to be addressed,” Williams said. “Politicians and countries need to take responsibility for the migrant crisis and find a compassionate solution to help the desperate men, women and children seeking refuge from other regions of the world.”