Covid: Plan to test drivers at Dover is ‘knee-jerk’ and could help virus spread, MPs warned
independent– Government proposals to test lorry drivers stuck in queues at Dover for coronavirus are a “knee-jerk” response which will waste time and could help the disease spread, a hauliers’ leader has told MPs.
And the director of policy at the Road Haulage Association, Duncan Buchanan, warned that with a backlog of as many as 7,000 trucks waiting to cross the Channel by this evening, the UK was heading for “supply chain disruption of the like we have never experienced”, with shortages in shops after Christmas.
It is understood that the UK government has offered to use the military to carry out quick-turnaround lateral flow tests to check drivers are negative for Covid-19, though Paris is understood to be holding out for the more reliable PCR test, which takes a day or more to produce results.
But Mr Buchanan told MPs that gathering truckers at a holding point in Kent to test them for coronavirus would force them to get out of their cabs and mingle, creating an opportunity for the disease to spread.
Mr Buchanan told the House of Commons Business Committee: “We’re hearing now about the prospect of drivers being tested before they go back to France. Personally, I think it’s a waste of time.
“You’re better off having the trucks moving and no-one mixing. We’ve had very low infection rates in the haulage sector, right since the beginning of Covid, because we had the right protocols in place almost immediately in the warehouses and supply chains around the country. So there is a lower incidence of Covid amongst drivers than there is in almost every other category.
“What we’re doing by stopping the drivers and sending them all to a field in the middle of Kent is they’re going to start mixing. This is actually counterproductive. I think it is a knee-jerk reaction.”
He warned: “I think we will end up with worse problems with Covid if we don’t get these people moving.”
Mr Buchanan warned that even if the blockage at Dover is resolved today, there will be a backlog of 6-7,000 lorries needing processing, many of which are parked up elsewhere in the country waiting for the situation in Kent to become clear.
He said that the disruption was “of a different order of magnitude” from previous incidents caused by strikes at Calais or adverse weather on the English Channel.
“In the context of Brexit and what is coming from 1 January, this is the start of a very, very serious supply chain disruption of the like that we probably have never experienced.
“We will be fine until Christmas at least, but we need to get going and recovering very fast if we’re going to keep the shops properly stocked after Christmas. It’s a big worry.”
Mr Buchanan said he was “very disappointed” by government ministers trying to minimise the problem, after Boris Johnson and Grant Shapps last night said only around 170 lorries were stuck in queues.
He said he was “angry” about the lack of provision of facilities like food, drink and toilets for drivers just over a week ahead of the official transition to Brexit on 31 December, when lenghthy queues are expected.
“I’m worried about the drivers,” said Mr Buchanan.
“Already the welfare for the drivers – the food and that sort of thing – fell apart yesterday.
“It’s just not working properly and it needs to be recovered as a matter of urgency. These are people, these are not lorries, these are drivers.
“These are people. We need to look after them properly, and it’s pathetic that we’re in a situation that we’re not looking after the drivers when we know this is coming in 10 days anyway.
“We should be ready for this.”
Ian Wright, chief executive of the Food and Drink Federation, told MPs that the government should have been prepared for France’s response to the declaration of tier 4 “stay at home” orders by Mr Johnson and chief medical officer Chris Whitty on Saturday.
And he said the government should be ready to compensate all the retailers, suppliers and haulage firms which have lost out as a result.
“Much of this should have been avoided,” said Mr Wright.
“The government was well aware of the power of the announcement it made on Saturday night. Indeed, Chris Whitty went out of his way – probably rightly – to scare the population about the impact of the second variant of Covid.
“But the point is everybody who listened to that would have known that everybody else in Europe was also going to be scared. Their natural reaction – and bear in mind is the reaction we had when Danish mink got infected – was to stop goods and people from that country coming over while they assessed the situation.
“Now, I don’t know whether the government made authorities around Dover and the commander of Operation Block aware of what they were about to do, but it doesn’t look like it, and the consequence of that is the chaos that we’ve seen over the last 24 or 48 hours.
“It really is incumbent on the government to come forward and be prepared to compensate those who’ve lost out because of that failure of authority.”
