SCT, Part Three

Or Lloyds List...

Well I think the pressure is on now. An article about the project I am working on has appeared in Lloyds List, an influential shipping newspaper.

The full article can be found here.

EVERY truck arriving at Southampton Container Terminals will be forced to book ahead under a radical scheme to end landside congestion at one of Britain’s premier box ports.

The scheme will ensure that this year’s peak season will see no repeat of the delays experienced at Southampton last year.

Although SCT and many other terminals have experimented with vehicle booking systems, this is the first time that any British port has introduced a mandatory requirement.

SCT, jointly owned by P&O Ports and Associated British Ports, has suffered more than most facilities from overcrowding as imports from Asia have increased much faster than anyone in the industry had anticipated over the past two years.

The company has received plenty of criticism in the past for not doing enough to relieve the situation.

The new scheme will be introduced on June 6, SCT's managing director Patrick Walters announced yesterday, and will apply to all vehicles without exception, including local shunters.

The idea is to smooth out the peaks and troughs during a 24-hour period, with SCT now planning to receive 120 vehicles an hour.

Lorries that miss their slot and arrive late, by “even a minute”, will be penalised with a charge of £25 ($47), although Mr Walters assured hauliers that the scheme was not as punitive as it seemed at first sight with plenty of ways to avoid a no-show fine.

A booking fee of £1 will be levied, but truckers prepared to work during off-peak hours will not have to pay.

Mr Walters described the scheme as ”revolutionary”, with SCT aiming to process up to 3,000 vehicles in a 24-hour period rather than around 1,900 at present by forcing hauliers to spread their arrival times throughout the day instead of bunching deliveries and pick-ups in the very early morning or the afternoons, as at present.

Addressing Containerisation International’s Freight UK 2005 conference in Liverpool, Mr Walters also said SCT had created an additional 400,000 teu of annual capacity by acquiring more land and reorganising the yard.

It has bought another dozen straddle carriers, arranged to have more manpower available in the busy second half of the year than in the first and undertaken training to create a multi-skilled workforce.

Overall, the port had invested three times as much over the past six months as in its entire history “in order to see us through the peak”, he said, even if that meant surplus equipment and manpower for nine months of the year.

Container lines are more concerned about port capacity in Britain than anywhere else in Europe, with Chris Bourne, managing director of MOL (Europe), admitting he was “nervous” about the next pre-Christmas season but praising the ports for doing “remarkably well” in the circumstances.

While calling for more feedering to help overcome inland congestion problems, Mr Bourne also questioned why this was not being done over British hubs rather than Rotterdam, which has seen a 40% increase in feedering to Britain over the past year.

Mr Walters said he was keen to develop more feeder services from Southampton to other parts of country and “claw back” some of the business lost to continental ports.

Speaking at the same conference, Drewry Shipping Consultants managing director Neil Davidson predicted there would be a British ports policy within five years but questioned how detailed or influential it would be.

In the meantime, feedering was one solution to the port capacity squeeze, he agreed. But Mr Davidson said he was unconvinced that the plans of some northern ports to attract direct calls could be made to work.

However, industry-wide efforts involving the Freight Transport Association, the UK Major Ports Group, British Shippers Council, Bifa, the Confederation of British Industry and other are now under way to find ways to resolving the country’s looming transport infrastructure crisis, Mr Walters disclosed.