FERRY STORY. .
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• The disruption of ferry services over the last week has underlined just how vulnerable is lorry traffic to and from mainland Britain. It has also underlined just how precarious is the position of the hauliers involved in that traffic. To a haulier, having a vehicle (perhaps his only vehicle) parked up in a static queue for several days is disastrous. Not only is the present load delayed at best, perished at worst: a valuable back load may have been lost as well, along with vital future business, and the standing costs of the vehicle have been ticking over without a corresponding income to balance them. For the consignor, the implications are as bad. A delayed load might not be paid for, even if it does eventually arrive in good condition. Again, ongoing or future business may be jeopardised, and certainly faith in road transport will be sorely tried, if not destroyed.
For the ferry companies, every stoppage like this must represent an extra boost for the Channel Tunnel and the alternative which it will provide when it comes into service. Every loss in confidence must represent another chance for the chunnel to establish itself as a viable link even where it otherwise might not be seen as a first choice on distance, economic or convenience grounds.
That, of course, means an even gretaer threat to the haulier, for every load transferred to a rail wagon for a 50km sub-Channel ride is potentially another load which will continue by rail on the other side.
It is obvious that the hauliers' organisations have recognised the threat in this — as can be seen from Transfrigoroute's action against the National Union of Seamen. What is less clear is whether or not the seamen have yet noticed the double threat to their own livelihoods. A loss of confidence in the ferry system will inevitably take away from that system more customers than would have left purely for the positive attractions of the rail tunnel.
The long-term implications are probably a little less dire for hauliers on routes to Ireland, the Isle of Man or the Baltic ports, on which there are no new-generation threats like tunnels with which to deal. Without their high-volume Channel routes to bolster their businesses, however, the ferry companies would be much less able to sustain some of those less-profitable routes, and the overall standard of ferry services could well drop. As an island nation with island outposts, Britain needs its ferries no matter what else happens on particular high-volume routes. What it also needs is a realisation among its transport unions that the futures of all forms of transport are interlinked, and that action against one harms, not helps, the others. Beyond a rapid and permanent solution to the present dispute, all sides in the transport industry desperately need a mutual reassurance that strikes in any sector of transport must be avoided, and that the inevitable frictions between employee and employer must be resolved in other ways.