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Geoff Gilbert has spent 30 years running trucks all over Europe from his Lincolnshire base—and the benefits of registering trucks "over there" were finally too much to ignore. David Taylor reports on a haulier who has set up a subsidiary in the Netherlands and has not looked back.
G, eoff Gilbert is going Dutch. Last November, fed up with the treatment meted out by the British Government to the road transport industry, this Lincolnshire haulier set up his own Rotterdam-registered subsidiary. Life for haulage firms in the Netherlands is a lot better than here, he reckons, so he had no qualms about shifting some of his business over there.
Gilbert's complaints will be familiar enough to any UK-based haulier. First there's tax: "With our government, it's all take, take, take," he says. "They take a lot from the transport industry and give nothing back. Every Budget day you know what's going to happen—a few pence on fags, booze and fuel. I like the way the media always tells you what it means for a family with two kids and a dog and a cat. They should look at us—when you reckon it all up, it means 160-8o ,00 o for hauliers. We're easy targets."
Market town
Then there's the state of UK roads: "Our roads are the worst in Europe," says Gilbert. "Just look at Boston: two trunk roads, the Ar6 from Peterborough and the A52 from Nottingham, join up just outside and then go trundling through a market town of 4o,000 people and on to the coast. All the Government says is 'we must take traffic off the roads'. They want to try living in rural Lincolnshire."
No wonder he's an ardent pro-European. Other EU governments treat their transport businesses with a little more respect and understanding. And there are plenty of cost advantages to being based in the Netherlands, especially from the tax point of view. "For example," says Gilbert, -airspoikr kits, light alloy wheels and other items which improve your fuel efficiency, are all tax-deductible. And as for fuel, if I fill up a truck in Luxembourg it costs me about boo less than it would over here."
Road tax is much cheaper too. Gilbert's two Dutch-registered Volvo Ell tractors cost him £2,500 less to tax each year than if he registered them in the UK.
It wouldn't make much sense to flag-out in the Netherlands if the bulk of your business was in the UK. But about 90% of Geoff Gilbert's work is on the Continent—and it always has been.
"I started in 1969 as an owner-driver, working for a Swedish company, Bilspedition, which ran a ferry into Immingham," he explains. "I took trailers loaded with paper out from the dock, and returned them loaded with British goods for export to Sweden." Soon he was travelling over to Sweden, and then to other European countries. His speciality became temperature-controlled distribution; typically fruit, vegetables and flowers.
Working on the Continent in the early seventies was not easy. "In those days, road permits were hard to come by—you just couldn't get them in some countries," he says. "The only non-permit countries this side of Europe were Holland and Belgium. I couldn't get a permit for Germany, so to get across to Austria I used to drive as far as Cologne and put the truck on a train to Stuttgart. I was only allowed to drive the short distance either end."
It was the eighties before Gilbert finally got a coveted EEC permit—at a cost of fro,000, "That's as much as a truck cost you back then," he says. Before that, country permits were rationed and the only way you could increase the number of trips you could make was by buying someone else's permit—and with it the truck. That's how Geoff Gilbert
International grew. "When I started, you couldn't even be a UK owner-driver unless you bought a carrier's licence. I bought mine with my first truck and it cost me £2,000," says Gilbert.
The Lz,000 was a loan from his parents. About fzoo went on the truck (an old ERF tractor which Gilbert says was "just a load of string and wire"). The other f r,800 was the cost of the carrier's licence.
After six months Gilbert replaced his tired ERF with a new Volvo F88. It cost him £4,7oo, and he still has the invoice framed on his office wall. "It was very unusual to drive a Volvo in those days—there were only about to F88s in the country. The HP cost me £35 a week, and it was well worth it," he says.
Within two years Gilbert had paid off his parents' loan and bought his truck. "I was very successful," he says proudly. Although the cost of setting up business was high, he had more than justified it. But things are different today, he believes: "Now it's very easy to set up business, but there's no rewards. The barriers to entry are now so low it's as easy as starting up as a window-cleaner."
Gilbert has tried adding other strings to his bow: for many years he ran a successful Scania dealership in Boston, which he sold only last year (to Scania itself, which offered him a good price). At one time he was even part-owner of a so-pin bowling alley. But road haulage is his main interest, and his last new venture before the formation of his Dutch business was Spalding-based Geoff Gilbert Air Cargo, created out of the purchase of an existing business distributing exotic fruit and veg jetted into London from around the world.
He tends to keep customers for a long time, and has some good blue-chip accounts. He's reluctant to name names, but you would instantly recognise the confectionery company and the poultry producer he numbers
among his best clients. His fleet of 35 trailers are nearly all specially designed. "I have about 25 for confectionery which will take 66 Europallets in two rows without the top row touching the bottom one," he says. He takes confectionery over to Switzerland from the UK, and brings Swiss confectionery back here (which is probably good news for British chocaholics). He trucks ducks to Germany, returns with frozen chickens...and even takes tulips to Amsterdam.
Setting up Geoff Gilbert (Holland) BV last November was therefore a logical move but, perhaps surprisingly, he has no premises there. The two Volvo F tractors, bought new, carry Dutch plates but are based in Lincolnshire. And although Gilbert has no premises in the Netherlands, registering a company there was neither easy nor cheap.
"It's a lot harder than you'd expect," he warns. "You have to invest money in the country and the Dutch authorities check you out very thoroughly. Setting up a haulage business over there is like it should be," he says, returning to his lament about the UK's low entry barriers.
Dutch offshoot
It's still early days for the Dutch venture, but Gilbert is nothing if not confident. "To be profitable you'd have to tax quite a few trucks over there, and with time we will add more," he says. From now on the firm plans to tax all its new vehicles in Holland, and there's no doubt that thebutch offshoot will assume a greater importance for the firm. The company already has a Euro bank account, and its latest trucks, a trio of Scania 124s, were bought in the UK but with Euros rather than sterling.
Even so, we won't see Gilbert up sticks and move out of Lincolnshire just yet. Having moved the business to a new Lim 22-acre site just outside Boston only last year, Gilbert has demonstrated that you don't have to turn your back on Britain—however bloody-minded the politicians are—to be a good European.