The purpose of UKWA and value of membership has seldom been more significant than at the present time, says the Association’s CEO, Peter Ward.
CEO, UKWA
In 2019 UKWA will celebrate the 75th anniversary of its launch. Originally known as the National Association of Inland Warehouse Keepers, it was established in 1944 when the wartime Government asked representatives from warehousing companies to form a committee to plan how food could best be stored and distributed from facilities situated away the nation’s major ports.
Fast forward three quarters of a century and, as Brexit draws ever closer, the Association has once again been sitting down with politicians to advise on the role that inland storage sites can play in sustaining vital food supply chains and relieving some of the pressure on our ports.
It seems inevitable that there will have to be some readjustment in the way foodstuffs entering the country at Ro-Ro terminals are inspected if rest of world rules are applied and potentially catastrophic bottlenecks in and around our ports are to be avoided.
Those rest of world rules dictate that food inspections must be conducted within the port boundary, but for, example, the 1000 trucks per day arriving through Dover (which bring 44 per cent of the country’s food supplies from the EU) after Brexit this will be impractical.
UKWA believes that part of the solution could be a change of legislation to allow food inspections to be carried out at inland storage facilities. Such sites could be built, or members’ existing facilities adapted, to accommodate inspection regimes and deliver the extra capacity so obviously needed relatively quickly.
But not just imports of food will be affected: the UK’s withdrawal from the EU is predicted to result in supply chain stress across many industry sectors. Perhaps paradoxically, this could be good news for our sector – after all, the proven safeguard against supply chain interruption is to hold more inventory, which means UKWA members are likely to see an upsurge in demand for their services.
However, any excitement over the prospects of a 3PL ‘gold rush’ should be dampened by the fact that a cumbersome planning policy restricts the construction of new storage facilities in the places where they are most needed.
Therefore UKWA is advising its members that they should prepare to seize opportunities for any spare or under-utilised capacity in existing networks to be fully optimised. The timely introduction of UKWA MarketSpace, our on-line portal to connect demand for warehouse space with available supply, has been warmly welcomed by government as a tool to assist in solving one of Brexit’s key challenges.
So, as in 1944, through its members UKWA is working closely with various government departments to help the policy makers understand the perspective of our industry and contribute to solutions and the formulation of coherent and effective policies.
Such is UKWA’s political engagement over Brexit, and many other issues, that as the clock ticks down to March 29 next year – the day when, regardless of whether we get a Brexit that’s ‘hard’, ‘soft’ or somewhere inbetween, Britain will leave the EU – only one thing seems certain: the purpose of UKWA and value of membership has seldom been more significant than the present time.
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