Millions of additional customs declarations will be required for goods crossing the border each year.
UK businesses are turning to cheaper foreign labor to complete their post-Brexit customs formalities, creating jobs in countries like Romania and India amid a shortage of skilled workers in Britain .
Anticipating an increase in demand for its services, Xpediator Plc, which manages freight flows for international companies, has hired workers in Romania. Dave Gladen, the company’s group marketing director, says the country has a large pool of expertise in EU customs rules, as it only joined the bloc in 2007.
“It gave us a lot of expertise and obviously the cost is lower,” Gladen said in a telephone interview. “The salaries of customs clearance representatives in the UK have just skyrocketed.”
Britain’s logistics industry must find creative ways to prepare for a wave of bureaucracy that will hit on January 1, when trade between the UK and its largest trading partner faces further red tape even as two parties reach a free trade agreement. Hundreds of millions of additional customs declarations will be needed each year for goods crossing the border, at an estimated cost of 13 billion pounds ($ 17 billion).
Metro Shipping Ltd., which transports goods for some of Britain’s biggest retailers and automakers, has hired an additional 17 people in Chennai, India in recent weeks, specifically to handle Brexit-related work. The Birmingham, England-based company expects it will need to process an additional 120,000 customs declarations per year.
“The skills are nowhere near enough to cover it,” said Grant Liddell, director of business development at Metro, which stopped recruiting new customers for Brexit in August because it was at full capacity. “We’ve really prepared,” he said, noting that he could hire six or seven employees in India for the price of one employee in the UK.
For the government, the shortage of customs brokers is one of the biggest threats that could disrupt trade with the EU after the end of the Brexit transition period. If companies do not have the right documents, goods risk being held up at the border, which could lead to traffic chaos. Companies can also decide not to trade with the EU at all if they cannot file the appropriate documents.
Authorities are trying to alleviate the problem by offering grants to companies to train customs staff, although success has been limited: of the £ 84million available, less than a third had been paid by Oct. 16, according to the National Audit Bureau.
The Road Haulage Association, a lobby group, estimated the UK needs 50,000 additional customs brokers to cope with the additional workload of Brexit. The government has repeatedly refused to quantify the number of people trained.
(Except for the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is posted from a syndicated feed.)
