British shippers, ports seek ways around port congestion
Part of the answer to the growing problem of port and road congestion in the United Kingdom is to make greater use of smaller vessels and regional ports located close to the final inland point, industry speakers told the Coastlink 2005 conference Tuesday.
In the United Kingdom, the concentration of cargo and containerships using the big ports in the south of England is “phenomenal,” said Nigel Chew, general manager, containers at PD Teesport, which operates the regional northeast U.K. port of Tees.
Northern ports probably handle just 20 percent of the 2 million TEUs of deep-sea container cargoes destined for or originated from northern England, he said. “We wonder why the roads overheat.”
In a situation analogous to the congestion of southern Californian ports in the United States, British shippers are having to choose between using the traditional congestion-prone southern ports of Southampton and Felixstowe used by the largest ships, or use smaller vessels that call at other ports. For cargoes to or from Asia, this requires an additional transshipment move because the direct container services do not call at northern ports.
B&Q, a big do-it-yourself retailer, now routes its deep-sea imports via the northern port of Immingham after feedering via the port of Rotterdam. The port of Rotterdam has attracted growing volumes of U.K. transshipment cargoes as a result of congestion.
Advocates of the smaller regional British ports say using them cuts both the inland transit time and cost of inland trucking — an increasingly expensive and troublesome transportation component in the United Kingdom and other European countries.
“Taking the ship to the cargo is not a new concept,” said David Petchey, managing director of Mediterranean Shipping Co. (U.K.). “But now there are bigger ships calling at a smaller number of ports.”
“The tricky bit is the inland operation — it’s getting more and more difficult,” he added.
Truck driver shortages, the adoption of shorter driving hours in the United Kingdom under the European Union working time directive, and the introduction of distance-based road tolls in Germany are changing the economics of trucking in Europe in favor of alternatives modes.
“On-carriage, usually by road, is getting more expensive,” said Mark Bennett, general manager of operations at Geest North Sea Shipping, a short-sea carrier.
John Foord, director of operations of Johnson Stevens Agencies, said shipping lines can no longer deliver an import container to British shippers the day after the ship’s arrival in port.
“If you want delivery tomorrow, please call last week,” he quipped.
There is also a “chronic shortage of deep-sea terminal capacity” in the United Kingdom, with projects for new capacity held up by lengthy governmental reviews. The liner agent advocates the use of coastal shipping services to regional ports.
“As an industry, for all segments of the industry, we are at a bit of a crossroad,” Petchey said. The carrier operates its own feeder service to northern regional U.K. ports, and considers coastal shipping to be “an uncongested highway.”
With some big decisions expected on the construction of new container terminals in the south of England and doubts about the duration of China’s export container boom, British industry executives are not sure whether port and road congestion is a temporary or a permanent feature.
“We have a more significant problem in the U.K. because of the imbalance between imports and exports,” Petchey said. He estimates that only one loaded maritime container is exported from the country for every three or four that are imported.
Chew, at PD Teesport, said moving a loaded container from the port of Tees to northern U.K. destinations and bringing the empty container back is more economical than moving containers and back over longer distances to and from ports in the south of the country.
“The round-trip time between Southampton and Leeds is 48 hours,” Chew said.
Responding to criticisms against congested ports, Geoff Adam, head of marketing at the Port of London Authority, rejected the view that all container ports in the south of England are congested. The port of Tilbury, near London, has no congestion problem, he said.
Steven Cox, global sea freight manager with H.J. Heinz, said there is a need for shippers, ports and carriers to discuss how to address the problem of congestion. “Shipping lines generally don’t seem to have an idea of what to do,” he said.
The sole shipper representative at the short-sea conference, Cox also expressed concern over the lesser flexibility of using feeder services to smaller regional ports, when compared to the traditional use of major container ports in the south of England.
Some industry spokesmen believe there will be a resistance to change if shippers are asked to adopt practices aimed at reducing congestion and smoothing the movement of trucks to and from ports at peak hours.
“I believe in the U.K. we’ve always been deeply truck-oriented,” Bennett said. Despite the greater uncertainty caused by congestion, he said big British shippers seem unwilling to relax their requirement that trucks deliver cargoes to their facilities in the morning and within a tight delivery window. Similarly, few trucking companies and shippers in the U.K. operate 24/7.