A bullish Peel Ports believes it can challenge Dover for cross-Channel freight flows with its Sheerness facility and the growth of unaccompanied freight at the port, and in broader terms, offering a service that accompanied freight cannot.
Peel Port’s chief operating officer David Huck told WPO that he is vey confident that Sheerness will see new services operating from the Medway port within the next six months.
“We will challenge Dover with our unaccompanied services with cargo increasingly moving to unaccompanied facilities,” explained Mr Huck.
Official UK Government figures show a shift from accompanied freight with goods vehicles having made 3m trips from the UK to Europe in 2021, the latest annual figures, a decline of 6% over 2020, and 12% on the 2015-2019 five-year average.
Unaccompanied trips, in contrast saw an increase of 1%, to 1.07m trips last year, which was 5% up on the 2015-2019 five-year average.
However, the UK’s Office for National Statistics does offer a caveat to the statistics which it said were “stable” in the five years to 2019.
“There has been larger than usual volatility from 2019 to 2021, with the number of trips in 2021 12% below the 2015 to 2019 average.
“This coincides with the end of the transition period for the UK leaving the EU, the COVID-19 pandemic, and reported disruption to global supply chains including shortages of HGV drivers and floods which affected some container businesses in mainland Europe.
“It is not possible to isolate the potential impact of any of these individual factors,” it added.
Even though the figures are not so easy to read vessel operator DFDS, which operates an unaccompanied service to Dunkirk in France from Sheerness, has reported an increase in demand.
According to Filip Hermann, DFDS VP for the Channel business unit, there had been incredible growth on its unaccompanied service over the last eight weeks.
“Our ship was sailing half full but it is now almost full,” explained Mr Hermann, who added that the Danish operator had replaced the 160 trailer capacity Maxine with the smaller, 120-unit Botnia, although the company was now looking at increasing capacity again with a larger ship.
Returning the Maxine to the Sheerness service is unlikely, however, Mr Hermann said that the ferry line has sister ship options to the Maxine which may provide extra capacity in the future.
“We will probably wait at least until we see how things go when the P&O crisis is over, just to see [if there has been an effect], we don’t think it is a symptom of that crisis, but you never know. So, I think we will just say wait and see how things pan out in Dover after P&O starts operating again,” said Mr Hermann.
DFDS pointed to some of the drivers [pun intended] of unaccompanied freight which the company says is the EU Mobility package, customs clearance issues and the shortage of truck drivers in both the UK and Europe – in all these areas the unaccompanied freight has an advantage over driver accompanied vehicles.
“With unaccompanied cargo the driver doesn’t have to wait for the cargo. So, that’s a big difference. It’s not that it’s easy or anything like this, it is the same trailer, but it might be taken out for inspection [by customs] or something like this but nobody is affected because there is no one waiting for it until the driver comes and picks it up. I think that helps our customers a lot,” explained Mr Hermann.
Both Peel Ports and DFDS confirmed that they are in dialogue over the development of Sheerness for freight, with space at the facility in abundance the port operator is likely to add a second ro-ro ramp.
Mr Huck confirmed that a decision on developments at Sheerness “will be taken within the next 12 months”
“There are not enough drivers in the UK and the ones that are operating don’t want to go to Dover, or to tramp across Europe – cargo at Sheerness is all pre-cleared,” which means drivers can drop off cargo and go home to their families, said Mr Huck, who added that most of Peel Ports’ ro-ro freight at Liverpool, Heysham and Sheerness is unaccompanied.
For DFDS the success of the Sheerness service has, “proved we can be an alternative to other ports, not only Dover, Sheerness is a good option”, Mr Hermann said.
Mr Hermann added that DFDS is eyeing other types of freight, including cars, paper and metals.
“We can hopefully work with customers and Peel Ports to do that [look at alternative cargoes]. And I also think that because they have so much space, we can maybe create something quite unique there for the drivers,” he concluded.
