Welsh Affairs Committee
Oral evidence: Brexit, trade and customs: implications for Wales, HC 1444
Monday 12 November 2018
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 12 November 2018.
Members present: David T.C. Davies (Chair); Tonia Antoniazzi; Guto Bebb; Geraint Davies; Ben Lake; Anna McMorrin.
Questions 33-82
Witnesses
I: Duncan Buchanan, Policy Director, Road Haulage Association, Sally Gilson, Head of Skills and Welsh Policy, Freight Transport Association, and Verona Murphy, President, Irish Road Haulage Association.
Written evidence from witnesses:
– Freight Transport Association
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Duncan Buchanan, Sally Gilson, and Verona Murphy.
Q33 Chair: A very special thank you to all our witnesses for coming along, especially those who have come from far and wide—from an island in fact. We have met Verona before, but thanks very much for coming along today.
You will be pleased, probably—Verona, anyway—to know that I am in the minority of one here in being a Brexit supporter, so perhaps I should ask you three not to give me a hard time, as opposed to the other way around. Anyway, I have worked in the industry and I think I was a member of the RHA at some time 20-odd years ago. I probably do not need to declare an interest, but I put it on record.
I will start off with your starter for 10, as it were. What outcome from the Brexit negotiations do you think would be best for the continued commercial health of the freight and haulage industries? What do you make of the Government’s Chequers proposals?
Sally Gilson: The best outcome is that phrase “frictionless trade”. There are questions around the practicality of the proposed facilitated customs agreement, but we are looking for something that is going to be able to facilitate the movement of goods as easily as possible, with workability on the business side, and being able to make it a simple process and not too big a change. The best outcome is one without too much of a change for our members.
With regards to Chequers, it probably works for the hauliers, but it potentially moves issues further up the supply chain.
Q34 Chair: That is interesting. If we have time, could you explain that a little bit? Why do you say that?
Sally Gilson: Can I come back to you on that?
Chair: Yes, that is fine.
Verona Murphy: Equally, to concur with what Sally says, the best outcome is one that would reflect the situation that we have today. I cannot think of anything that does that except to remain in the customs union, which obviously is the bone of contention. The just-in-time produce that Sally talks about is where we are going to have the most significant difficulty. Everybody is talking about customs but, as we have discussed before, the Department of Agriculture checks are going to be the ones that will be more arduous because of the amount of product that is agriculture-based.
For instance, 40% of poultry product has to be inspected because it comes from an EU country either through a third country or from a third country. If you can imagine the amount of poultry we eat in Ireland and the UK each year, that is significant. That has the potential to block ports just on its own.
Q35 Chair: Since you raise that specific example, there is a lot of poultry coming in, I think, from Thailand, and I would expect that perhaps standards might be different there, putting it carefully. What about poultry coming in from other western European countries? Can I put it to you that perhaps these checks are not applied when poultry is coming in from countries with similar standards to the rest of the EU nations?
Verona Murphy: I would say they are, rigorously, particularly anything that is going into the food chain, but again it is 40% of the product. It is 40% that currently we are not taking into account what comes through or from or into a third country. It is the increase in that going forward.
In Ireland we have a particular difficulty in that we have only one port that is designated as an agricultural inspection post, and that is Dublin-Holyhead, or Holyhead-Dublin. Effectively any product that comes from the UK into Ireland or through the UK would have to come through Holyhead. We have made representation on our own side to have Rosslare designated, but equally in Fishguard, Pembroke the facilities at the moment are certainly not there and I am not sure what the preparations are for that. That is something we can discuss.
Duncan Buchanan: You ask what outcome we want. From the Road Haulage Association point of view, we have very strongly focused on three things right from the very start. We needed to address labour. Quite a bit of that has been addressed by the Government already in accepting settled status and accepting European qualifications going forward. Both of those things are very good. There are other issues where we have a long way to go. The Migration Advisory Committee came up with plans that we think were absolutely inappropriate. That is a problem with labour we still have going forward.
Customs was the second thing we were very concerned about right from day one. In that respect we need fluidity through the ports. “Frictionless” is what it is called, but if customs requirements become part of what the future is, then frictionless is out the window. Forget frictionless just for one moment and think about fluidity through the ports, getting things through the ports in a predictable, simple and straightforward way, which is what my colleagues have been talking about.
The third thing that we have focused on in the Road Haulage Association is the issue of permits and access to the market, where lorries are able to trade and move. Those three core issues are the background to where the RHA is at.
You asked about Chequers and what sort of outcome we need. As I said, we want something that is fluid and as frictionless as possible. It is really up to you as the politicians to tell us what we have to do. At the moment we do not know what we have to do, and that is the thing that we are finding absolutely impossible. We do not know what to do, our members do not know what to do and we cannot advise them. There is absolute impossibility in preparing for whatever is coming next because we do not know what is coming next. The uncertainty is in fact the worst of all worlds. With 96 working days to go, we do not know what to tell our members to do because they have no idea what customs arrangements are coming forward or what is going to be the next step. No deal with no transition, from our point of view, is completely unacceptable because it is going to lead to massive and catastrophic disruptions in the supply chain.
Q36 Chair: In which case, will you be recommending publicly as an organisation that people support the Chequers deal rather than risk crashing out without a deal?
Duncan Buchanan: Whatever deal you come up with, we are not going to support one type of deal, whether it is a free trade agreement or Chequers or staying in the single market or the customs union. That is not for us as a trade body to recommend. It is purely a political thing. Whatever landscape you give us to work with, we will find ways of working with it. That is what supply chains do. That is what the whole logistics industry does, whether we are in Europe or we are trading with Turkey or China or whoever. There are systems that can be put in place. Where we are now is the worst of all worlds because there is no preparation at all.
Q37 Chair: Can I put that point to Ms Murphy and Ms Gilson? I appreciate you are probably going to say—
Verona Murphy: I am far more brazen than Duncan and I would not err on the side of caution. Ireland is far more adversely affected than other EU countries, so I would be biased and say I would not necessarily recommend Chequers but I would very much express the opinion that there has to be a deal. It would be catastrophic not just for yourselves but for us also, and that is a selfish opinion. I absolutely agree that I had no input into the UK people’s referendum but I do understand the consequences.
Just to inform you, while I am an Irish-based haulier and I am President of the Irish Road Haulage Association and 50% of our trucks are working on the continent, 50% of those trucks bring product to the UK from mainland Europe. We do not just come back to Ireland. We bring your product to all of the multinationals: M&S, Tesco, Lidl, Aldi, Waitrose—all of them. This is time-sensitive product mostly. For it to be delayed, it will be catastrophic. If there is no deal, it can go anywhere.
Q38 Chair: Thank you for that. Ms Gilson, did you have the thoughts on Chequers or no deal?
Sally Gilson: Our members would have quite different viewpoints. We cannot speak as a collective for all the members because I am sure they have different ideas, but I will just reiterate what Duncan said that we will work hard to deliver whatever deal is put in front of us.
On the point before, when I mentioned about the supply chain and the fact that it moving up would be the issue, the impacts on the system would be felt in the rest of the world checks. That would be the issue.
Q39 Guto Bebb: We take the point that you cannot speak on behalf of all your members because they have different views. So do all the political parties from what I can gather on this issue as well. We keep referring to Chequers as a deal. It is not a deal; it is a withdrawal agreement with a hope for a deal in another 19 months.
I want to ask Mr Buchanan a question because you raised the issue of the uncertainty being a problem. I am sure there will be a huge sigh of relief heard from industry if we decide to have a temporary membership of the customs union as a result of the Chequers deal going through the EU and Parliament in due course. The key question I would ask is surely we are giving ourselves only another 21 months of uncertainty because the future trading relationship has been agreed. When you said you need time to be prepared, how much time are we talking about? My understanding, having spoken with people at Irish Ferries and Holyhead Port, is that they need significantly more time than the 21 months that is in this as part of Chequers.
Duncan Buchanan: A lot of people have said they need a lot more time. You have to look at where we are starting from. We are starting from a situation where there is no customs IT system in place at these ports to handle road-based traffic. There are huge IT issues there. The ports themselves need to understand how the supply chain is going to work before they can work out what infrastructure to put in place, because the infrastructure is not there now.
The situation we have at the moment is the worst of all worlds, in that if we fall out next year, there is no infrastructure, there is no personnel and there are no systems in place. It is truly appalling. I would say you need sufficient time to do whatever it is that comes next.
If the ports are saying it is going to take three years to put it in, I would suggest that that is probably plenty of time to put almost any infrastructure in place if you are doing it as a matter of urgency. The problem that you then come up with is the speed at which Government fail to do things—the failure of doing the IT quickly and the best gets in the way of the good.
I am very concerned if we do have a withdrawal agreement that does kick it down the road for 21 months, but we need as much of that time as possible to put in place whatever comes next. Your point is really key. We do not want to be back here in two years’ time with exactly the same thing, with the three of us here all talking about, “In a few months’ time we are going to have to do something, but we don’t know what it is yet”.
Q40 Anna McMorrin: I think your points are really pertinent, but I would also reinforce what my colleague was saying about the transition. This is a political deal. There are going to be two deals here, not one: the legal framework and then the political deal. That means nothing is agreed, and all of that is going to then be agreed throughout the following transition time, however long that will be. That leaves everything uncertain, unable to put those things in place because you are constantly not knowing what is going to be at the end of that. Is that timeframe going to keep pushing and pushing and pushing? It is an indefinite no-man’s land. What is a way out of that for you?
Verona Murphy: You, and that is the simple answer. We are the practical end of it. We do whatever you say we have to do, and that means that if you stay in the customs union we do not have paperwork. If you stay in the common transit arrangement, we have a certain type of paperwork. If you leave the common transit and you go out of the customs union, we have a different type of paperwork again. As Duncan has reiterated, that is our problem. We have systems but we do not know which system we are going to use, so we cannot advise members.
The tizzy for our members is that everybody is panicking and everybody is spending money trying to train up on this, that or the other, and we can’t advise. We just can’t. We can say, “Yes, go and do this course and go and do that course”, but the fact that these are quite arduous and complicated systems means that the members are getting very frustrated. The more they see of these systems, they do not work.
There are arrangements between Norway and Switzerland and there are different considerations for Donegal and Fermanagh. It is very difficult. As a trade association, we cannot go any further.
Q41 Geraint Davies: There are three logical options, in a way, which are a deal—I know there could be many deals—or no deal, or it goes to the idea of having another vote and the idea of staying in the EU. I would be interested in what people think of the idea of having a vote, now that we have more information from you and other experts in other fields of what the real implications would be, because many people did not predict the sorts of issues you are talking about. Can I just ask?
Duncan Buchanan: Can I answer that from the RHA point of view? I will answer it in a non-answer way. This is your choice. You are the politicians. You need to make your choice based on the information you get from people such as ourselves about the reality of what we are dealing with. We have 96 days to go until 29 March. That is not enough time. At the moment there are only two factual things our members can do for Brexit. One is to get an EORI number, which is a customs reference number, and the other one is to make sure that they are logging on to a system that is going to allow them to apply for permits in a month or so. You have even less knowledge about what you have to do next.
We are in an impossible situation at the moment, and as far as we are concerned the referendum is a political game that is going on and is not helpful. We need people to focus on what the job is, and that is providing us with the framework with which we can work.
Verona Murphy: A very important point to add to that is that last week there was a statement made by your own Department for Transport that said that Northern Ireland traffic will not require permits to deliver in the south. That was something that I was flabbergasted by because it sounded like a bilateral arrangement, something that we were not advised of or aware of. I had to go to my own Department of Transport and ask how that was agreed, as we would see that as a competition issue in some regards. They said it was not agreed and that they had posed a question to the Department for Transport. There is misinformation.
It would be lovely to think that we would enter into a bilateral at the precipice of Brexit, that Ireland and the UK and Northern Ireland would say, “Listen, we’ll all work away together and we’ll live in harmony”. It would be lovely, but I am not so sure that that is what will happen and it is not something I would even intimate. That type of misinformation is hugely unhelpful for the industry—hugely—and even for politicians who seem to think that once that statement is made, that is it. Then two months later somebody says, “But I thought they could transit without permits”. I do not know how that came about but I really do believe it is something that should be addressed politically.
Q42 Geraint Davies: What I was getting at is that I know you do not want to make any political points. Given what you are saying, clearly business as usual in the EU is easy to do because that is what you do and anything else is going to be more difficult. On that point, in the event there may be no deal—and we have begun to touch on it—what sort of contingency plans do your organisations and members have? Sorry, Sally Gilson, I did not let you answer the other question but perhaps you can answer that as well. Would you be happier in the EU?
Sally Gilson: I am not going to answer that. Our members at the moment are having to weigh up exactly what kind of contingency plans they need to make. I hate to reiterate the point—
Q43 Geraint Davies: If there were no deal, is there anything people could do?
Sally Gilson: If it were specifically that they were having to deal with a no-deal scenario, obviously that is taking it to the very worst scenario for us because although everything can be negotiated, it is not going to be negotiated on day one. It is virtually impossible for anybody to make proper plans without making huge investments for something that might never happen.
The shippers are actively looking at all options for moving product. Logistics providers are closely reviewing all of the technical notices. All the members are looking to see what the impact of this will be, but do you decide to invest in a no-deal scenario and start building those emergency warehouses or whatever it is that you would have to do? Would you really want to spend millions of pounds on infrastructure when you do not have to?
Q44 Geraint Davies: May I ask you, Verona Murphy, on this contingency plan for no deal? It seems to me that some people may start thinking about on the one hand stockpiling and on the other hand looking at sending a product to different markets. If you are producing a certain kind of product, whatever that is—agricultural, pharmaceutical—and thinking of sending it somewhere else and trying to get some over the line before we know what is going to happen, are those things that people are doing about a no-deal situation?
Verona Murphy: For us, our main objective is to retain the land bridge. As a market for us, it is the most economical, time-saving manner in which to reach the mainland. However, on the basis that there may be no deal, that means ultimately we will spend millions on new systems.
Contingency-wise, we are looking at different shipping routes, alternative shipping routes that will circumvent the UK, that will get us to mainland Europe, particularly with our high-end product. The trouble is, from Ireland, the least-valuable product travels the least distance, which is the UK market, but contingency-wise we are exploring the possibility of getting to mainland Europe without the land bridge. Unfortunately for us, that is quite expensive, as you can imagine, but we have no choice but to explore these options. We have new shipping routes from Cork to Brittany, Cork to Santander, Rosslare to Cherbourg, Dublin to Cherbourg. I think that the new ship that Irish Ferries are preparing, which was to ship from Dublin to Holyhead, will most likely end up, in a post-Brexit no-deal scenario, on the direct route, which would be Rosslare to Cherbourg. In my opinion, that would be a travesty for the Welsh ports.
Q45 Geraint Davies: On that, I think I have got you right that you said 50% of the exports go to the UK, 50% go to Europe, and of that 50%, half come back in some sense. Given that the ports like Fishguard and so on will not be ready in the way that Dover may be, would the idea be that some of the products, instead of going to Wales, will basically go to Europe to come through Dover because there is not the infrastructure and facilities in Fishguard or wherever to receive stuff that they are freely receiving at the moment?
Verona Murphy: No. I mean that the actual product that ordinarily would be for mainland Europe will go directly to mainland Europe, as opposed to transiting on the land bridge. Equally, it will mean that the idea of the Irish truck taking goods from mainland Europe back into the UK will become not just arduous but extremely expensive.
Q46 Geraint Davies: Can I ask Duncan the same sort of stuff, which is basically what would be the contingency plans? What will be the impact of no deal? I did want to ask people whether you had any access to Ministers to discuss these things. I presume you have not, have you?
Verona Murphy: Not here, but in Ireland, yes.
Duncan Buchanan: I think contingency plans are almost impossible to put in place at the moment. I will give you just one example. The contingency for international road haulage access is through something called ECMT permits. This is a 1950s permitting system that allows international haulage. It is quota-limited. That quota limit is only going to provide between 5% and 10% of the necessary permits for UK road haulage to enter the EU. We are going to have somewhere between a 90% and 95% shortfall. This is the process that is going through at the moment, that was done in the international permits Bill quite recently.
In a couple of weeks’ time our members are going to be bidding for these permits. They have no choice, because that is the contingency, and 90% or 95% of those applications are going to fail, possibly more depending on how the system is gamed by people. People are going to be faced with no permits to enter the EU sometime next year, and I know that there are members of ours who are now turning business away because they are not sure that they can do it. This is a huge consequence for many of our—
Q47 Geraint Davies: This is for no deal or in any case?
Duncan Buchanan: This is for no deal. Obviously, if we have a withdrawal agreement and we have it in the next 21 months, where things continue on as they are, then next year is not the issue. It then becomes 2021 rather than 2019. Again, we have the same problem going forward to 2021. We need to know what we have to do to comply to continue the movement of goods.
Contingency becomes incredibly difficult when you do not know what you can plan for. Customs has done notifications about its new proposed pre-declaration system or pre-notification system that it talked about in its partnership paper and that the National Audit Office has talked about. That is the only detail that you have. You do not know what that really means. I know a lot more, but I am covered by an NDA so I cannot explain significant extra processes that are planned for this contingency. The IT is not there. I can guarantee you that what is in place at the moment for 29 March next year will not work for road haulage.
Sally Gilson: Can I add to that on the point that Verona has made? If it is correct and there is not this special agreement between Ireland and Northern Ireland, that permit situation becomes significantly worse.
Verona Murphy: In practical terms, Geraint, what that means is that 95% of the product coming into the UK has to be brought in by foreign-registered trucks—not Irish, not English; foreign vehicles that have to have the interest in coming to you in the first place. It is going to get very much more expensive because of the cost of doing all that extra transitioning and transactional detail.
Q48 Geraint Davies: To the consumer, you mean?
Verona Murphy: Not just to the consumer, but it is going to end up with the consumer. When you ask about a referendum, it is the information that is required. People’s standard of living is going to get more expensive. It does not mean it is going to get better. It is going to get a lot more expensive.
Q49 Guto Bebb: Can I jump in, just to be a pain? I wanted to follow up on the point you made about the potential alternative routes being developed to bring Irish goods into European markets. Clearly, to a very large extent it makes perfect sense that the high-value goods are more likely to go further, but on the UK as a land bridge, what sorts of delays would have to be encountered before some of those alternative routes became more competitive?
Verona Murphy: Currently the UK land bridge takes, with road works, which is a significant aspect of it currently—
Guto Bebb: You have clearly been on the A55.
Verona Murphy: Seriously, we would expect a land bridge from one to the other, a Welsh port, to take 10 hours. Our most direct sailing is 17.
Q50 Guto Bebb: What sort of delay would result in the alternative options being more competitive?
Chair: This is Anna’s question.
Guto Bebb: I do apologise.
Chair: I will tell you what we could do. We could always go to Anna first if Ben does not mind, and then we could—
Guto Bebb: Yes. It is my meeting with Irish Ferries. I am so excited.
Chair: The land bridge is a great issue. You have rightly spotted it. I would not want to steal the—
Guto Bebb: No, I do apologise.
Q51 Anna McMorrin: No, that is fine. Thank you. On the land bridge, following on from Guto’s very good question on the delays, we know that the External Affairs and Additional Legislation Committee of the National Assembly for Wales said it was unlikely that the UK land bridge between Ireland and continental Europe will be bypassed after Brexit if we go for a deal. Would you agree? We do not know what is in store.
Verona Murphy: Absolutely. What it will depend on, Anna, is when Geraint said that Dover would be significantly more prepared than the Welsh ports, it is actually not true because the three Welsh ports put together would not cater for the traffic that Dover caters for on a daily basis, which is around 5,000 vehicles. The Welsh ports have mainly one or two ships arriving at any one time. You have ships, you have the train, Dover-Folkestone, all coming into the one direction. That is what will cause the delay for us. If it means arriving in Dover and there is a significant backlog because of immigration, agriculture and customs, you have at least four agencies that you will be checked by and then again on the French side. You can circumvent all that by going direct.
My issue, Anna—and we spoke about this collectively—is the driver and labour shortage that has ensued in the industry, and it is nothing to do with Brexit but it is expected to get much worse post-Brexit. The average age of a driver is one where they will not put up with what has been perceived in past times as the denigration of what they do. Regulation and overregulation ensues authority from all of these agencies on people who are just doing their daily work. If a driver meets four regulatory enforcement agencies, he or she has been spoken to generally in a manner of being talked down to. The workforce will deplete, and that is an issue for Ireland, the UK and the EU in general. It is a huge issue that we have to protect our workforce from the mental stress of Brexit. Although it might take us seven hours longer to get to mainland Europe—unfortunately—we will have certainty and we will have absolutely no angst.
Q52 Chair: How many extra hours would it take you to get to mainland Europe?
Verona Murphy: Currently our fastest sailing is Rosslare to Cherbourg, and that is a 17-hour sailing. Of course, if you put the boot down and increase the knots, it could be as little as 15, and we are looking at Rosslare to Le Havre, which is a 15-hour crossing. Strictly speaking, with a delay at both the Welsh port and Dover, there is not that much difference.
Q53 Chair: If I might just gently suggest to you that any vehicles going towards Germany, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and so on would be quite significantly delayed because they will still have to drive over then from—
Verona Murphy: Yes, it would be significant. It is not the option, but Le Havre would more service Benelux and that area. If you take a certain amount of traffic on the Cherbourg route, that means that you have less traffic on the transit of the land bridge, and they are the ones that would probably necessitate it. Again, it depends on the product. It absolutely depends on the product, if it is time or date sensitive, perishable product, pharmaceutical, high-end.
Q54 Chair: As we know, Calais is a good port to get into the Benelux-Germany area. From Le Havre or from Cherbourg towards Calais adds quite significantly to journey time.
Verona Murphy: About five hours. For Le Havre it is about three and a half, and from Cherbourg it is five hours. You would have five hours extra driving to Calais.
Chair: Plus your 17.
Verona Murphy: Exactly, plus your 17. That is why I say it is expensive, but from a mental stress perspective it may be what the drivers will choose. It is on-off. It continues to be roll-on, roll-off.
Q55 Anna McMorrin: What planning is the road haulage industry doing now for that scenario? What are you and your members planning in Ireland?
Verona Murphy: Absolutely none. There is nothing we can do, Anna. We are lobbying very stringently to have Rosslare Europort made Brexit-ready because clearly it is not an agricultural inspection post. It needs to have tier 1 status. That would align us with Rosslare and Le Havre. There is quite a lot of work to be done. It is in the planning stages to accommodate just the agencies. We are looking at, without a shadow of a doubt, three to four years before Rosslare Europort becomes ready. That is servicing Fishguard and Pembroke.
Dublin-Holyhead is similar. Dublin is trying to prepare some space because it expects that with customs inspections and agency inspections there is not any space because it is a roll-on, roll-off service. Everybody drives in and drives out. Again, there is not any preparation from the hauliers’ perspective; just none except maybe re-establishing. I do have some enquiries from UK operators to establish in Ireland, and that gives them the ability to continue. They will not need ECMT permits if they are trading with the EU. If their industry is just Ireland or UK continental, they are not going to need the permits.
Duncan Buchanan: Can I say one more thing about the permits? You have raised it again. It is not certain that European operators will not require ECMT permits as well. If there is no bilateral agreement and there is no deal, EU hauliers may require ECMT permits to come into the UK, and Ireland is quota-limited and so is France, Germany and everyone else. Those ECMT permits are limited in their numbers, and that is why, if we get into a situation where we do not have a future trading relationship, we are going to end up needing to engage with our fellow European partners and do bilateral deals so that lorries can continue to move.
The other thing about the supply chain that you need to really understand is that the road haulage supply chain is driven by reliability and predictability. Transit time is very important, but for just-in-time deliveries, reliable transit time is the foundation on which everything is based. If you know you have another 17 hours to put in your supply chain, that means that you might not be able to carry some goods, but for the rest of the goods you will know that it is just 17 hours longer. It will be more expensive but it is predictable.
The problem we are going to have with the land bridge is that any land bridge system that is put in place in a no-deal situation will have massive elements of unpredictability in it because customs clearance processes are unknown at the moment.
The other thing people need to understand is that unlike container ports, ferry ports do not have inventory systems. No container leaves a container port without customs saying, “Yes, leave”. There is no such process for road haulage. The ferry comes in and at the moment it drives off. There is no one there putting their hand up, except for the occasional border force. They turn around and say, “You, I want you over here”. When people are talking about the 4% inspections and all the rest of it, that is absolutely not the point. The point is that all of the vehicles have to have an authority to enter the UK; either they are cleared through customs or they are in transit. That status is known for a container port but it is not known for a ferry port. That is where the major change will happen.
Q56 Anna McMorrin: We know that there is the fear about a soft land border between the Republic and Northern Ireland, but perhaps a hard sea border between the Republic and the Great Britain. Given that we know that the UK Government have at the moment—but things change day to day, or hour to hour—ruled that out, could you tell me how Welsh ports and the haulage industry would be affected?
Sally Gilson: I will attempt. From my understanding, at the moment you have the hard border, then the sea. We would then have to play customs policemen and treat anything coming in as rest of the world, from my understanding. I am getting a nod from my left so I hope I am correct. There would still need to be checks and perhaps trusted trader deals would need to be put in place for that to be able to work. Holyhead would definitely need to be ready to be able to do the customs checks, so that would be some significant investment.
Q57 Anna McMorrin: Do you want to comment on any of that?
Verona Murphy: Not really. It comes back down to what Duncan has said. It means that it is a different regulatory system and we really need to know which system. It does not really matter. It does matter—of course it matters—but at the end of the day it is not for us to decide. It is just for us to prepare, and we cannot at the moment.
Q58 Anna McMorrin: What would you then say? It would be good for us to have an understanding. You are talking about your own industry, quite rightly, the road haulage industry and transport. That has an impact on what those hauliers are transporting, where the goods and services are ending up. Are you having those conversations with suppliers where that is, in effect, going to be disrupted whatever deal—no deal or bad deal—is going to be in place?
Duncan Buchanan: Shippers and consignees do not know what to do either. They do not know what the future is holding. On these conversations about land borders and sea borders, at the moment there are effectively no customs borders. There is a VAT relationship that is done automatically through VAT agreements and everything works seamlessly. As a haulage organisation, whether a haulier is delivering to Dortmund or Dorking, it does not matter. They can just do it at the moment. Everything you do that puts customs into Donegal or wherever is adding friction. We will have to deal with whatever comes our way. If it requires a load of paperwork to do Northern Ireland, I am sure that will be done. It would be undesirable. I am not sure what the politics of that are. I think the politics of that are very difficult. You are the politicians. You need to make the decision on that. As traders, as businesses that are physically moving the goods, we need to deal with whatever those paperwork handovers and physical handovers are going to be.
Verona Murphy: I do not mean to interrupt, but albeit that we will work with whatever the solution is, it is extremely important. In our budgetary proposals this year our sector has estimated the cost of Brexit—with or without not necessarily a hard deal but just the disruption—for year one to be £180 million to our sector in Ireland. If you look at the timelines, when Duncan says it is just-in-time, every truck that takes a load into the UK is booked in with a delivery time. If you miss that slot you wait for the next day because, if not, you will disrupt everybody. It is the certainty that is relied upon and that can only come with a frictionless border. Anything else is uncertain and you disrupt the whole of the country.
If you look at what BMW and all these companies are saying—I worked in Vauxhall and when you were on a line nothing stops and everything depends on having the parts in place when they are required. It has moved on so much that parts are ordered on a 24-hour basis. Everything is done because it can just arrive; there is not an impediment except for a breakdown, something unforeseen. Ultimately, the whole system has evolved in 20 years with frictionless trade. Anything that happens other than another referendum is going to disrupt that and cost money.
Chair: Tonia, if everyone else is happy, maybe you could ask your question. It follows on quite well from what we have just been talking about. Then I will come back to Guto and Ben, if that is okay with you.
Tonia Antoniazzi: I will do whatever you want, Chair.
Chair: I doubt that very much. Question 6 follows quite well, so we can go to that and then come back to you if that is all right.
Tonia Antoniazzi: I was question 6, wasn’t I?
Chair: Yes.
Q59 Tonia Antoniazzi: Yes, great. I have got what you mean, then.
I wanted to pick up on something that Duncan said about the politicians, and I completely get it. Being a relatively new entrant to Parliament, I cannot believe what I am hearing. Is it not the responsibility of your associations to represent the views of the hauliers and inform the politicians? For example, have you surveyed the hauliers and do you know what their views are on Brexit? It is easy enough to say, “We will do whatever you tell us to do”, but I just find it a little bit shocking. We are politicians, but also we listen to what you are saying. It is evident that in this Committee a lot of us do want a people’s vote, but do your hauliers want to remain in Europe? Is that something that—
Duncan Buchanan: I can tell you we did survey our members. This was before I joined, before the referendum. We asked them the question. Of course, it was not scientific, it was not an accurate poll, and our membership was divided, just like the country.
Q60 Tonia Antoniazzi: What about yours, Sally?
Sally Gilson: We have surveyed quite a few members. Yes, it was divided exactly the same as the rest of the UK.
Q61 Tonia Antoniazzi: Also, views have changed. That was a long time ago. Is it incumbent upon your associations to be seeking the views of the hauliers now they know—
Sally Gilson: I do not think it is up to us to ask them about a people’s vote because that does not necessarily change what provisions they have to then make. Is it up to us to then discuss with them what we need to be telling Government about what will be required in the future and vice versa?
Q62 Tonia Antoniazzi: I think the message is very much, “Get on with it”. If that is going to be to the detriment of your hauliers and finances and business—
Sally Gilson: A people’s vote would make it very political, and we do not get involved with the politics like that. We will not give a viewpoint on remain or leave. It is not for us to say that.
Verona Murphy: I think it is fair to say, as an outsider, that if there are not any bilaterals post-Brexit and it is a precipice, it is going to be ultimately the haulage industry that will suffer the most. We cannot be sure. I have not had any discussion in relation to a precipice and whether or not we would accept in the EU—because we will be still in the EU—an English driving licence, for instance. It is very concerning for us because many of our workforce are UK, Northern Ireland.
Q63 Tonia Antoniazzi: It also passes on to the consumer, making life more difficult and more expensive for our constituents, so it is very important that we know. Anyway, I will move on. How does freight and road haulage benefit the Welsh economy?
Duncan Buchanan: This is not just the Welsh economy. This is economies everywhere. We provide the necessary links between businesses. We provide the goods that end up in your supermarket. We link your farmers to the factories that make the food, that make the flapjacks, and we move these bottles of water. We move the bottles; we move the caps; we move the desks; we move absolutely everything. If it was not for road haulage, there would be no industry. That is essentially what we do. We facilitate the movement of goods. That impacts across all economies. I would suggest that the road haulage industry is no more or less important in Wales than it is in other places.
Verona Murphy: In Ireland you have Dublin, Cork and Wexford, which are the three strongholds for the haulage industry. Our biggest aligned sectors are in those counties. That is like Wales where you have three ports and you basically have probably a huge concentration of haulage operators in Wales as opposed to the rest, Kent being the second biggest, I would imagine, and then Liverpool, north of England. Obviously you have a different infrastructure from us. In Ireland the main employment sphere in the port areas is the road haulage sector.
Q64 Tonia Antoniazzi: Do you have anything to add, Sally?
Sally Gilson: Not really, no.
Q65 Tonia Antoniazzi: Outside of ports, which industries benefit from freight passing through Wales? Duncan has mentioned a lot of them. Agriculture. Are there any others?
Sally Gilson: Think of a sector and that is who benefits. No sector can exist without us.
Q66 Tonia Antoniazzi: How will these industries lose out if traffic moves elsewhere following Brexit?
Sally Gilson: The main issue will be if those journeys are bypassing Holyhead and so on. Then it will be massively felt. The supply chains are so ingrained in those areas within the supply chains, especially with just-in-time, it would be difficult to then—
Verona Murphy: I think there is a perception in Ireland with some sectors that Brexit will not affect them. There are people who do not directly deal with anything. It might just be somebody thinking of a concert and going to a concert. The idea of bringing the products that build the stage is all very arduous post-Brexit. For me, the simplest example that I have given is that the milk does not go in the cow. The milk goes in the truck. Anything that slows that down means that the milk goes off or becomes less valuable. That is where it is going to go. It is the economy as a whole that suffers when road transport slows down because the cost of road transport stays the same. If you carry less product, the cost of the transport goes up.
Duncan Buchanan: I think we are very much focused on Brexit and the international road haulage section of the business here, but it is also important to recognise that the vast majority of road haulage is conducted as domestic. It is Wales into the UK, into Scotland and so on. The international road haulage sector is a subset of the road haulage distribution system that happens within the UK.
What happens with the international is that it comes into warehouses, gets broken down and ends up in our domestic system. The idea that the domestic haulage operators are not going to be impacted is not true because it will ripple right throughout supply chains. We need to be cautious, but some people are very sanguine because they do not do international. They think they are not going to be affected by it but they will be affected by it.
Q67 Chair: How many Irish lorries are picking up from Wales or within the UK and dropping off on their way through?
Duncan Buchanan: It is unmeasured. It is completely unmeasured. No one knows.
Verona Murphy: There is no need to record.
Duncan Buchanan: There is no need to record it. At the moment an Irish haulier will have a half-empty lorry perhaps coming back from Europe or going into Europe. They will pick up extra pallets on the way through and drop some in wherever.
Verona Murphy: For instance, on a Sunday night I take chickens to Dover, Kent, and I deliver so many pallets of poultry and then I go on with the rest to Ireland. Post-Brexit, no matter what happens, that cannot continue.
Q68 Chair: That will have to be done by a British haulier.
Verona Murphy: No. My product means I will either take the full load to Ireland or the UK will lose its pallets, simply because there is no status in the Department for Transport for a load like that to be delivered split. That is the problem. It means that you lose out because you either have to order more turkey and chickens to make it viable, or we have to order less and we come direct. It is as simple as that. There are lots of things that will be affected. It comes down to when I deliver those pallets, they are then removed through the UK with a domestic haulier. If they are not there, the domestic haulier loses out.
Sally Gilson: I will carry on with the chickens here. We currently have a scenario where you have Northern Irish farms producing the chicken. It goes to County Tyrone and then on to Dublin port, then across to Holyhead, then to Grantham, where it gets dismembered and then distributed to whatever chains are going to use it, so to Tesco or wherever.
Verona Murphy: That will not be viable after Brexit.
Sally Gilson: Yes, which then might actually end up going back to Northern Ireland. Whenever there is the slightest delay—if that driver is delayed by an hour, misses the crossing and then has to wait for the next crossing, and obviously the chicken has a very short shelf-life—they would have to almost double-man and bring in an extra driver because they would have hit their driver’s hours limits by then, and then stop, change over driver, which is a cost, just to ensure that the chicken is still arriving in Grantham at a time where they still have this five to six-day shelf-life available for it. It is not just those movements that are going right the way on to continental Europe. It is a very complex UK supply chain that just happens to go through Ireland.
Q69 Chair: Can I risk incurring the wrath of all three of you? I have probably bored you before. I was driving those lorries over to the continent prior to 1992. As far as I can recall, when we arrived—I think it was Ramsgate we used—I would personally hand paperwork in to a portacabin run by Grange Shipping and somebody would pay them something in the region of a tenner, I think. Within the time it took me to have a fag and a cup of coffee, my paperwork was back and I was off. Are you not making a slight mountain out of a molehill here? If that was possible in 1992 before any of us had computers and we did not have one in the office, how is it going to be so difficult to do this now?
Verona Murphy: David, I would have thought you had learned from your experience in Dublin.
Chair: To be fair, I will say that in 10 years of doing it, the nicest people I ever met were Bewley’s in Dublin: the only people who ever gave me a cup of tea with a china saucer. That is absolutely 100% true.
Duncan Buchanan: I am impressed with the Irish hospitality, as always. I always find Irish hospitality very good.
You have just highlighted the world as it existed in 1992 versus the world that exists now. In Dover there were hundreds of clearance agents. There were thousands of staff doing exactly the sort of work that you are talking about. They do not exist anymore; they are gone. There are no portacabins. The French are talking about putting portacabins in. In the RHA the other day one of my colleagues drew the contrast between the French preparing portacabins and parking areas and places for this sort of work to take place and the portaloos that are planned for the motorways here. We are in a very pathetic situation when we are talking about putting portaloos on motorways to look after drivers. That is not the way to treat people in the 21st century.
Verona Murphy: What has not been mentioned is the tachograph regulation. When you park trucks on motorways it does not mean that the driver can move when you want him to move because his tachograph is all the while ticking down. You could well end up with many trucks parked on the motorway.
Q70 Chair: This is a bit scary, but is this likely to happen? If we could cope perfectly well in 1991—
Duncan Buchanan: You are talking about a third of the volume.
Verona Murphy: At least. It could be even more because of borders.
Duncan Buchanan: You are talking about a third of the volume. At the time, Dover was bursting at the seams. They were struggling to cope.
Verona Murphy: You did not have the Channel Tunnel.
Duncan Buchanan: You were struggling to cope at that time. That was with experienced, qualified staff in customs, with experienced, qualified road hauliers, with experienced, qualified agents all doing the work. That is not what you have now. If you had two years or 18 months to prepare and you could train people to do the customs work—you are not going to train someone until you know that you are going to have a job at the end of it. That has been done before by Government where they have said, “We are bringing in rules”, and then they have changed their minds and not brought in rules. A load of people have spent money on training. That is not acceptable.
Verona Murphy: You also did not have the tachograph regulation that you have now. I had just started driving in 1992. You did not have tachograph regulation. The rules were not enforced. They were there.
Chair: We had tachograph regulations.
Verona Murphy: Yes, everybody did, but they were not enforced, not like they are now.
Q71 Chair: Our company was very strict on that sort of thing. I do not know what was going on elsewhere.
Duncan Buchanan: I would agree that they are enforced now.
Verona Murphy: Rigorously now.
Chair: We definitely had them.
Geraint Davies: Going back in time.
Chair: Anyway, I had better go back to the questions.
Verona Murphy: I hope you gave up smoking.
Chair: I did. We all did that.
Q72 Guto Bebb: Moving back to the present day from 26 years ago, just quickly then, you highlighted the fact that you felt it was embarrassing that we were looking at doing work on our motorways with portable loos, whereas the French are already preparing for possible eventualities. How well prepared are ports in Wales, in your view? I ask you specifically about Holyhead because, in terms of the agricultural sector and the nature of the work that goes through Holyhead, I think it is the pre-eminent port from my perspective in this discussion. How well advanced are the preparations?
Verona Murphy: I cannot comment on that because I am on the Irish side.
Duncan Buchanan: I asked some questions about this and I would say that it is not prepared at all.
Q73 Guto Bebb: I am interested in the comments about the Irish side not being aware because clearly, when I was previously a Minister—going back a while now and in another Department before the one I resigned from—Irish Ferries was of the view that Holyhead would find it impossible to make itself prepared for any eventuality simply because the land is no longer there. Is that something that you have heard from an Irish perspective?
Verona Murphy: That is the same in Irish ports because they have developed the ports from roll-on, roll-off. I remember when I started Rosslare was huge. It seemed like a no-man’s land. Now there is not an inch of space. I am sure Holyhead and Dublin are similar, Dublin in particular. The only way Dublin is preparing is it is having to pay for the relocation of some of the haulage firms that rent its premises. It is as bad as that. It is dealing mostly with the container traffic, moving that so that it can facilitate the accommodation of agencies and possible queues. Again, no amount of land is going to suffice in Dover.
When David says 1992, we had only started with Folkestone at that time. If you were to take a trip down there on a Saturday night and look at what trucks have to find parking just for their normal course of events with the tachograph, there is not any parking currently and that is normal. Again, I know I am talking international, but there is a huge problem with the infrastructure countrywide all over Europe for safe, secure parking. That is without the issues of Brexit.
Q74 Guto Bebb: Are there any other views on Holyhead being prepared?
Sally Gilson: For fear of sounding like a broken record, yes, it can prepare the facilities and the personnel, but it takes significant investment and time.
Q75 Guto Bebb: It takes time, and they do not know what to do.
Sally Gilson: It is the balance, isn’t it? At what point does it decide, “We need to do it”?
Q76 Guto Bebb: This is a follow-on question from something that was said earlier about potentially in the event of no deal when you would have to depend upon bilateral agreements. This might be a political question, which is unfair on our Irish guests. It could be said that the Irish Government have played a very good game in the Brexit negotiations over the past two and a half years, and that is not sounding insulting in any way, shape or form and do not take it as such. Clearly it could be argued that the Irish Government have secured a very strong position as a result of playing by the European rules and being very much the good Europeans. How likely are they to engage in bilateral agreements if that is seen to be going against the wishes of the European Union and the European Commission moving forward?
Verona Murphy: As brazen as I am, I am not going to answer that because I am not a politician, so I had better err on the side of caution. I do not know, Guto. From the perspective of bilaterals, if there is a precipice, it is going to have to come down to negotiation. Again, we will be in the EU, so “I don’t know” is the answer. I would not intend to offend anybody in relation to answering it, to be honest, but I will stay friends with you. I will come back.
Q77 Geraint Davies: I want to ask a different question. My understanding is that the single market in the EU is a system and there will be no facility for any bilaterals, no country will be allowed to break EU laws in trading with Britain and there will be no bilaterals with any European country.
Duncan Buchanan: That is not the case.
Q78 Geraint Davies: How will they allow that?
Duncan Buchanan: That is not the case. When it comes to international road haulage, member states of the EU have bilateral agreements with third countries already. The UK, for example, has bilateral agreements with Turkey, the Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Morocco and so on. We negotiate our own bilateral deals and arrangements for road haulage with non-EU states. That is the way the system works now.
I understand that the European Commission wants to do the deal for the whole of the EU, and that has been done in the past. The arrangement with Switzerland is a land transport agreement. We would support a land transport agreement with the EU where we agreed something like the Swiss arrangement, where it can do international road haulage across the European Union and in and out of Switzerland and EU hauliers can do the same. We would be very happy with that. We would be happy with a deal that allowed UK and EU operators to do international work to, from and through the UK. We would be very happy for the Irish haulage industry to land-bridge through the UK if we can do the same through other EU states as we need to. That can be done. There are options for a cohesive, comprehensive deal with the EU, but it is also within the competency of the member states to do individual bilateral deals.
Q79 Geraint Davies: I was going to ask something very different. If you take an example like insulin, there are a million people in Britain who are diabetics, who are dependent on various drugs. Clearly a lot of this is time limited. I know the Health Secretary has said that pharmaceutical companies should build up six weeks of stock and this sort of thing, but clearly there is going to be an issue here. What is your view on the prioritisation of certain categories of product? They might be lifesaving products but there are all sorts of other categories. You have mentioned perishables already. Can you envisage a system? At the moment it is everybody can move around in a frictionless way, but can you imagine a situation where we are able to get essential services, lifesaving drugs and so on through the net more quickly, or is that just logistically a nightmare?
Sally Gilson: How do you prioritise that?
Verona Murphy: Lots of that product does not come on its own. It is now groupage, which is easily and readily done. You could have food mixed with dry product. If you are going to start to prioritise like that, I think you will probably see an abuse of process where you will have a canister of insulin on a full load of something else just so it can be transited quicker. I do not know. It is something that is certainly a novel idea, Geraint. I have not thought about it from that perspective. I think currently the likes of UNICEF and aid like that certainly has priority, but I think this is the only instance.
Duncan Buchanan: I absolutely agree. Something you also need to realise is that when it comes to the international road haulage market between the UK and the EU, 85% of the movements are done by EU road haulage operators. Immediately you start putting in place rules about what can move, what commodities you need to be carrying to get in or out and the reprioritisation, you are then dealing with language problems and paperwork problems, you are dealing with people who may not feel accountable to the UK Government and may not necessarily be completely honest. They would never be Road Haulage Association members, obviously, but people will be creative in what they say they have in their lorries and they will game the system. Selecting winners by commodity is not going to work.
Geraint Davies: Will there be more smuggling?
Chair: I think we’d better move on. Ben Lake has been waiting. In fact, he hasn’t asked a question yet. Mae’n flin iawn gen i.
Q80 Ben Lake: I fear that everything has been covered, so I will go off-piste for a minute, if that is all right.
It has been mentioned this afternoon that there is a great deal of uncertainty as to what, if any, arrangements will be agreed, so I will not try to tempt you to give an opinion as to what you think will happen. If we find ourselves in the position where the UK is a third country and there will be no customs arrangement with the EU, could you spell out a little bit the practical implications for that of enhanced customs checks at the borders and so on—the impact it would have practically?
Sally Gilson: The customs checks are not going to be the biggest issue. There are problems there but they should not be too onerous and are possibly things that can be resolved. Again going back, the biggest problem is the permits.
Duncan Buchanan: I would disagree with some of that. People think of the physical checks. They think of the inspection of the goods as being the big issue. It is not that that is the problem. It is the fact that every lorry will, as a matter of international law, need to be controlled passing through the border. They have to present customs documentation. If you remember the Ramsgate example that you gave earlier on, you pull over, you go to the portacabin, you have your smoke, and then you are told you can go. You do that on the other side, and in most cases—
Chair: No, I did not do it on the other side. I never did it on the other side.
Duncan Buchanan: It may have been done as an agreement on one side only, just like the Norway-Sweden border works. You only clear once on the way in and you provide the paperwork there, but that is not what we are told is going to be required. We are being told that you are going to have to do your export declaration, you have an import declaration, you have an export safety and security declaration that has to be done by the haulier. This is a huge amount of data that has to be put into a customs system for them to say, “Yes, you can drive off the ferry”. That process is not in place.
Verona Murphy: Equally, you have a workforce now that is used to moving. In certain countries you have a workforce that is only paid when it is driving. There are different wage agreements in different countries, but that is a fact. If you have someone who is taking product to the UK and they are going to be delayed and they are not being paid and in some instances they are going to sit for 24 hours because of the tachograph, they are just not going to do it. Why would drivers put themselves in that position?
Equally, they have moved on from where you were prepared to wait, David, because that was the system that was in place, to just driving through. If you put a mechanism in place now, if that mechanism means that they are waiting—I remember standing around a burning barrel in Rungis, Paris, waiting for them to clear the meat product at 4 am, but that was part of the joy of it. If I had to do that now, I can tell you something, my attitude would not be the same.
When you ask about the impact, Ben, that is going to be the impact. We have a huge, conjoined—and all throughout the EU and worldwide—shortage of workforce. Something like this will not entice them.
Sally Gilson: I will just come back on that and redeem myself slightly. It will be a lot more difficult for SMEs because they do not have access to all of this knowledge. They are going to need to know trader IDs. They are going to have to be able to find the correct customs value of products. They will probably get a third-party customs agent.
Going back to the skills issue, we have to find suddenly all of these people who are going to be able to help keep this in process, which is going to be perhaps the bigger issue with regards to customs.
Q81 Ben Lake: That brings me on to two final points. In the circumstances that it is a chaotic exit, how do you foresee that impacting on the structure of the industry itself? To come back to something that we discussed earlier about the just-in-time economy and the integration of supply chains and how tight the margins are, how do you think—if it is possible in the modern economy—the supply chains can accommodate this unpredictability? Do we mean that we will certainly see far more warehouses and so on being constructed in order to try to stockpile things?
Verona Murphy: You cannot stockpile fresh, time and date sensitive product. It is just-in-time and that is where the value is.
Sally Gilson: I am going to go into my specialist subject now and talk about skills, where I feel a little bit more comfortable. The skills issue going forward is potentially going to be a lot harder post-Brexit. As a sector, we are very reliant on EU workers, much to do with the fact that we have the mutual recognition of the driver licence. It makes an EU worker much more attractive when it comes to HGV driving. Our warehouses are full of EU workers, especially seasonal workers, and we are really desperate to be able to keep and maintain that access going forward, not just for the full-time employment but for those seasonal people.
At the moment, as Duncan touched on earlier, the MAC report does not grant anybody beyond the agricultural sector special dispensation to be able to continue to recruit especially those lower-skilled workers, where 88% of logistics workers are under the £30,000 salary threshold and 90% are lower-skilled, so they are at level 2. I am not saying they are low-skilled because HGV driving is incredibly skilled, but it is only ever going to be a level 2 qualification. We have huge restrictions coming down the road. Ten per cent. of all logistics workers are from the EU, but that is greater when it comes to warehouses. You are looking at more like 20%. For truck drivers it is 26%, and for HGV drivers it is 13%. We already have a driver shortage of 52,000. Take away those drivers—off the top of my head, I think it is about 39,000 EU HGV drivers—and you have a really big problem because we will not even have the personnel to be able to work in the warehouses that we are going to build to stockpile or deliver the goods around the country.
Duncan Buchanan: The UK Government have got themselves into a bit of a poor place when it comes to the MAC report. It has mixed up wage level with skill. We really do need to make sure that we have the people with the relevant skills coming in. If that is lower-wage skilled workers, so be it. We should be catering for lower-wage skilled workers. Care home work is skilled work. It is lower-wage, but if that is what we need, then we need those workers. It does not mean that we should not be training our own workers either. We have, as a country, failed to train people adequately. We need to deal with that, but we also need to recognise that lower-wage skilled workers are needed.
Q82 Chair: You have given us quite a bit more of your time than we were expecting.
Verona Murphy: Could I finish on the point?
Chair: Please, yes.
Verona Murphy: When you get the blame for not having another referendum, I will give you a job.
Chair: You are very kind. I feel so strongly about it, I will happily drive lorries if I have to to see this through. That is true. I am very passionate about it. I do thank you for coming in, and I think we need to make this happen as smoothly as we possibly can. On that point and with a last plug for Bewley’s, who are lovely people, thank you very much.