Is Brexit killing Channel crossings? | This Place: Dover

dover in august can mean only one thing a media crew reporting on swarms of immigrants flooding great britannia but despite what the right and their outriders want you to think that's not actually the biggest story in town brexit lorry drivers drivers gaps on shelves immigrants it's the same helicopters covey but now the brexit and it's up it is a myth that a few thousand people fleeing war and famine are our nation's biggest problem they aren't even dovers it's actually truckers specifically a lack of them [Music] last year small boats arriving into the uk across the channel accounted for about 0.59 of total migration the number of people claiming asylum in this country has actually gone down from 32 733 in 2015 to 29 456 last year and for all the government talk of france needing to do more they received three times as many asylum claims as us france has a similar population and economy to the uk in fact across the eu in 2019 the rate of asylum applications averaged 14 per 10 000 residents in the uk it was five for ten thousand if you've been to a supermarket recently you've likely seen this a serendipitous storm of brexit depriving european drivers of freedom of movement into the uk and the pandemic means there's now a shortfall of 100 000 hgv drivers hampering the supply chain the army's been put on standby to maintain the food supply the army has 2 000 htv drivers and if one thing's more numerous in dover than its chalk it's trucks [Music] my name is dominic graham i'm the quality and insurance manager for alkaline uk alkaline uk are an international haulage company we have a fleet of over 100 vehicles uh 20 of those vehicles are currently off the road could you try and put some context on it for someone who might not be familiar with the industry what the last 18 months have been like okay hell on earth no no no no it hasn't been easy i mean uh brexit has caused its own problems as we know and you're right that that has caused massive delays at entry points into the uk and we are now having to do a lot more red tape paperwork than we had to before um you know as brexit approached we had a lot of staff drivers uh we we used to employ a lot of non-uk drivers who were worried about brexit some of them returned to their countries um you know to consider what they were going to do next and then obviously kovid came along and that had a massive impact as well you know everyone wanted to go back to where they came from be it warsaw in poland or romania or whatever and uh a lot of them never returned so we were then very short of uh drivers and there isn't a massive driver base in the uk due to covid and the lack of hgv testing that was uh going on and historically not a huge amount of uk based drivers there's a shortage the rha puts the shortage at nine on a hundred thousand we'd say that's probably about right i don't think the government sees that shortage as uh as being that high and although they've tried to put solutions in place they are nowhere near good enough you know the haulage industry is the is the lifeblood of the uk yeah we deliver your food we deliver you in white goods you have um luxuries and um you know you need drivers to to be able to uh to do that i expect 20 of the fleet will affect our turnover by somewhere between 7 and 10 million this year [Music] there's innumerable companies like alkaline scattered along the coast between the euro tunnel at foxton and the port of dover struggling to deal with the same problems but what about the general public surely they're pissed off about the small boats cluttering up the seafront what are kind of the issues that local residents care about uh i'd say the town's a bit run down lorry drivers i mean i couldn't believe it when the the press was going on about and you are starting to notice gaps on shelves and and if you walk through the town there's loads of loads of places that are saying we want drivers we need drivers to keep us going a lot of chad shops but a lot of high streets like that on there and then um that's about it really the seafront they've received done like i said though the harbour and bit which is i think bringing lots of people down this way which is nice they need to carry on upgrading things because as you see when you walk through the town there's so many shops that have closed some of them due to covid so you can't do anything about it you've always got the coast i love the coast and you've got lovely walks up just the top of the cliffs there you've got the um i think it's national trust land uh it's nice to take a beer up there or picnic uh same as the end of the pier as well and they've just opened the newest bit the pier went down there the other day which is nice to head down there for a little walk the town's just as alright but seafront's better so it needs a lot of money going into it and improvement and whether we can get it because we're so far away from you know london it's a problem and i think the biggest problem is the through traffic don't put any money into the local community which i think is totally wrong although migrant crossings are a concern for some it's one of the big issues in your eyes um immigrants and traffic okay and by traffic do you mean do you mean people trafficking or do you mean the actual traffic in the town no traffic in the town okay so it's a one-way system so as soon as france decides they're closing the port because they're having a strop you can't move anywhere and i'm assuming the sort of the htvs the big lorries et cetera they probably the big hues et cetera yes the whole lot backs up who do you hold responsible for that the council the government the french specifically the french yes historically we would run auto parts for the uh the motor industry in the uk we would collect stuff from italy bring it back to the uk on a just-in-time basis but obviously we've had to diversify since brexit because of various hold-ups due to you know um yeah just hold ups at the border with customs checks etc uh so now we have diversified and we we do a lot more general goods and foods we've invested in some refrigerated units which we didn't have before we've even invested in some helicopters the urgent products depending on what they are it may be a box of windscreen wipers or a box of cigarette lights there's not so much cigarette lighters anymore but some you know special vital small parts that are needed for the production line and yeah if a production line goes down it costs hundreds of thousands a minute so the cost of them hiring a helicopter to bring those parts easily um covers those uh potential costs or losses rather um just to be clear is this again this is in response to sort of potential slow ups after brexit yeah and the response for your company was helicopters absolutely yeah we looked at lots of different options and we thought well you know we know what the uh delays are like at the tunnel our drivers have sat in them four days um and there have been times where yeah i think in the past we've used different methods to try and get product here quicker you know taking it off the lorry in france and putting it on a smaller truck but at the end of the day the helicopter was the uh the best way forward and two is better than one yeah for sure obviously why have one helicopter you can have two there's quite a few trucks in the yard at the moment is it usually this busy you don't want it to be this big don't want it to be this full in the yard it's full because a lot of these trucks we don't have drivers for them we like the haulage industry needed to track down some of this rare breed and get the driver's perspective obviously there weren't any in alkaline's yard so dominic drove us around the corner to where we might have better luck the local caf my name is ernest i'm a truck driver and what are you driving today what's in you what's in your truck some kind of hazards chemicals some kind of food stuff since brexit obviously the uk there's been a slowing down of customs in the beginning it was like really bad it was like four or five hours but now it's okay now it's much better yeah it's like 30 minutes that's it okay there's a driver shortage yes yeah about maybe a hundred thousand drivers yeah yeah that we need um how have you found the job in recent months is the pay increasing can you get better loads better jobs nope it's the same the same thing yeah it's the same like always yeah no problem yeah yeah it is the same also in the twenty the shortage of truck drivers but they don't want to pay they are not raising the salary so it's the same problem everywhere i think oh so do you think it's because of the salary yeah because it's the salary there's really a small salary okay i'm getting a little bit more but like usually the drivers are getting like like you're talking here they're getting like 60 65 euros a day so they're and they're like driving in here like four or three months half of year then i'm going then they're going back you know do you think there's a difference between the english drivers and the european drivers yeah english guys they're getting more money than us yeah actually a lot of and presumably you would think that that would mean there would be more drivers in the uk and not if the salaries it will be fine yeah i also was thinking to come to the england uh with my wife's skill but now the brexit and it's up yeah yeah yeah the documents they're so hard to get them difficult for me it's okay but for my family this they're difficult uh we would normally look outside the uk to fulfill these particular vacancies because obviously there aren't enough drivers in the uk but unfortunately the non-uk the european drivers um unless they've previously worked in the uk up until i think 31st december are no longer allowed to work here we can we can probably you know uh live with the trucks being off the road for a short period of time no more than really a couple of months uh we have other options that we can rely on rather than the the government sorting it out we can move all these uh trucks to the eu and flag them in a different country and then we'll have no problems getting drivers because we'll employ those drivers in holland or in italy and they'll still be allowed into the uk to deliver so yeah it's it's it's okay well let's talk about the politics of this then it sounds like it sounds like chronic mismanagement to be honest with you it sounds yeah absolutely i don't think the government in a lot of areas but obviously haulage is one of them i don't think they've looked at the the long-term effects of brexit and yeah a couple that we covered as well as to what effect it would have on the haulage industry it it's just a shame that you know a driver who is considered a professional uh when he's dealing with the police in the uk or the the dvsa or a judge or a magistrate you know if they're up in front of any of those for a legal reason they're considered professionals however the government doesn't consider them professionals they're not skilled enough to warrant uh being on the visa scheme yeah it's just a it's just a real shame what we'd like to see is the government look at drivers similarly as they do to seasonal farm workers and to maybe come up with a with a similar seasonal visa or even even if it's just for the next two or three years whilst their other solutions uh bear fruition from what you're saying it sounds like this is equally as much of a sort of home office issue as it is a department of transport issue absolutely yeah no i mean it's both departments maybe they're not talking to each other um but yeah they need they need to cooperate to to sort out this mess because you know um we often see pretty patel in dover uh admittedly often that's to do with migrant crossings the crossings of the channel and she's not down in dover talking about the lack of visas for the drivers that the village companies need she's down here sort of uh sorting out the the issues with the migrants crossing in their small boats uh and um yeah completely ignoring the fact that um there's a shortage of um not just drivers i'm sure there are other industries that are being affected so the next time someone tells you that we're facing a deluge of migrants on our shores ask yourself why and why aren't they talking about this [Music] foreign

Channel: PoliticsJOE

Views: 182,094

Keywords: Politics, UK politics, British politics, Parliament, Government, Westminster, english channel, immigration, nigel farage, breaking news, coronavirus, brexit, brexit haulage, truckers, hgv, haulage, road haulage, truck drivers, lorry driver shortage, news, coronavirus news, brexit news, dover, dover immigrants, small boats, refugees english channel

Id: vpG2EJP-N4Q

Length: 14min 42sec (882 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 17 2021