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The Channel Tunnel and Brexit


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Given all the doom and gloom regarding Brexit and most French forum experts seem to think that the UK is going to economically implode, what is going to happen to the channel tunnel ?

Due to a broken down train I was trapped yesterday in Folkestone for 3.5 hours and 95-99 % of the car traffic was British. In fact all the times I have been across it is mostly British cars. The only other French reg car I saw was a RHD BMW registered 24 driven by a bloke with a big beer belly travelling with his family !! You could not make it up LOL.

I am guessing that in a couple of months time the tunnel will close because the British will no longer be able to afford or be allowed to go abroad.

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We've used the Tunnel for years and see many cars from different EU countries, as well as seeing them when driving towards/away from the Tunnel. However, at the weekend we returned to the UK by Eurostar; most of the people we saw/heard were British.

Why should we not be allowed to go abroad in a couple of months time? Article 50 has to be put into action first, then there will be 2 years to agree on terms and conditions.

Do you really think the Tunnel will be closed or is that a wind up?
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Never mind about the tunnel, will I still be able to get my Tesco and Asda on line shopping orders of Heinz baked beans and white sliced bread delivered to me by the man in a van? Thats the important issue.

 

I saw a Uk programme on a thriving business in central London doing the same thing but delivering by electric bike, 10% of the order cost plus between IIRC £10 and £30 for delivery, as most of the stuff was coming from Harrods etc including one single bottle of water they were really coining it in.

 

Perhaps there will be a real rise in the UK shopping delivery companies when the euro is really strong against the pound and freedom of movement is curtailed, although they will probably rebrand themselves as smugglers [:D]

 

I always said that change creates opportunities.

 

I reckon in time any parcel deliveries from that enemy foreign country the UK will be subjected to stiff handling and customs charges like some already do for stuff from the USA.

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No it is not a wind up. I was twiddling my fingers at the tunnel for the 3 + hours waiting for a train (kids driving me mad) and thinking that if all goes bad economically for the UK the channel tunnel could be in trouble given that most of the traffic seems to be British. Not many French go on holiday to the UK by car if at all.

I don't go to the UK that often but I would say in the times that I have been most cars are British. As much as 70 % I should imagine ?????

I have to admit though in my short time in the UK nothing seems to have changed. No one was talking about Brexit and the shops and pubs were full as usual. What doom and gloom ?

Maybe I read French forums too much as if you read the dark side forum you would believe from the economic (I used to be a postman now living in France and worried about my pension) experts that the UK is going to collapse.

Well if that is the case, sell your shares in Eurotunnel.
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Well there is a potential impact but not what you are thinking ALBF.

Like GG I don't see vast hoards of Brits giving up their foreign holidays even if they cost a bit more.

However, if the UK fails to get free access to the open market, then you will see freight being held up at the tunnel and also the ferry ports as it customs clears. Dover is already pretty congested but I guess they could expand towards the Western Docks. They could even re-open Folkestone.

But when you look at the Tunnel, I cannot for the life of me see how they can find the extra land to hold the trucks while they clear at Cheriton (Folkestone). The site is hemmed in by the Downs and the sea.
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No worries, the problems would be in Calais, after all where would they put all those Polish, German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovackian, Italian and Spanish Trucks fighting to sell their wares in the UK, also the cars full of young talented European youth flying after the well paid jobs in the city of London. I travelled from Calais today and there were probably more European number plates than UK ones. I love all this negativity about the UK, especially as most of it's wishful thinking. Also if we take our barbed wire back there will be no secure compounds to stop the trucks getting broken into.
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Well, if the Eurostar has no tunnel,to go through, (it's not just for cars and freight, you know) that could be awkward. All those nice French people from Kensington will just have to hope that they can make do with a baguette from Paul in South Ken instead of hopping on a train and heading for Paris or Lille to stock up on their little necessities. Hang around St Pancras for an hour or so any day of the week and then tell us that the French don't use the service...

Not to mention the people who do go on holidays (or business trips) by car to and from the UK and Belgium or the Netherlands.

Isn't the operating company French, anyway?

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Yes, Eurotunnel is French and Eurostar pays Eurotunnel for each passenger it carries - I read it was somewhere around £20 a while back.

We did hang around St Pancras for about an hour on Sunday, waiting for our son to pick us up as he was in a big traffic jam. It was very cosmopolitan, with far more people passing us engaged in conversations we couldn't understand than those we could.

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Betty has highlighted a real issue regarding customs control at the Eurotunnel terminal but if they put both controls back in their respective countries then presumably the space liberated by the French in England will be used by the English.

 

A couple of problems with that, it will be an and to the greatest asset of the tunnel, you drive off, accelerate through the gears and within a couple of hundred metres are joining the M20 or A16 at Vmax, now it will be crawling around a sinuous one way sytem through border and customs controls, secondly I dont think other than be paid to be there, or probably not to be there, the French customs actually did anything at the Folkestone terminal, I bet there isnt even room or Equipment for commercial vehicle checks.

 

The above is pure supposition as I have never taken a commercial vehicle through the tunnel.

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Well, it seems the boss of Eurotunnel believes every cloud has a silver lining....

(From the FT)

"Mr Gounon also foresees a silver lining for Eurotunnel if Britain votes in the forthcoming referendum to leave the EU, an outcome that many other business leaders would consider a disaster.

His theory is that Brexit could herald the return of duty-free shopping for British visitors to France and vice versa. Before its abolition in 1999, the “booze cruise” trade generated a tenth of Eurotunnel revenue. “It would be an incredible boost for my business,” he says."

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Ane Eurotunnel only got a fraction of the business that the ferry companys did, it was too time consuming to buy the booze, fags etc in their shop, you could not do it during the crossing like the ferries, unlike the ferries whose day trip foot passengers were a captive audience all the ET travellers would drive off to Cité Europe or Eastenders (horrible man) and do their shopping.

 

So it will be a great positive for me, a return to the days when you could just pitch up at Dover or Calais and pay a tenner for a return crossing or buy the currant bun for a week cut out the coupons and pay a quid.

 

Every cloud has a silver lining, good to see a French company looking for a positive.

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Yes and I have been mentally formulating what sort of deal I would negotiate with them for a package tour.

 

The bulk of my anglophone customers are from Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA, a Brexit is not going to affect them and given how much time and money they spend to come to the WW1 battlefields to pay respects to their ancestors I dont think slightly more onerous border controls will put off the UK customers.

 

We didnt need a visa before joining the EU did we?

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Remember that before we joined the EU the duty free allowance was 1 .litre spirits and 2 litres wine and 200 cigarettes. It was EU rules that allowed us to buy much larger quantities for personal use at local tax rates.

Until we know what deal is negotiated it is impossible to say what will happen.

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NickP wrote:

No worries, the problems would be in Calais, after all where would they put all those Polish, German, Hungarian, Czech, Slovackian, Italian and Spanish Trucks fighting to sell their wares in the UK, also the cars full of young talented European youth flying after the well paid jobs in the city of London. I travelled from Calais today and there were probably more European number plates than UK ones. I love all this negativity about the UK, especially as most of it's wishful thinking. Also if we take our barbed wire back there will be no secure compounds to stop the trucks getting broken into.

Unquote

You are right Nick some or even many of the problems will be in Calais - but Calais has acres of land to expand into.

As for negativity, well I am simply taking the current situation and applying it to a UK outside the open market. I accept that thinking the UK would be excluded is negative, but given the current position where the PM had to resign because he could not separate access to the market from free movement of people, I think only a wild optimist would expect the UK to have free access without such freedom of movement.

So then Brexit creates a new EU customs boundary down the Channel with the EU on one side and the UK on the other.

I will not talk about tariffs. That is speculation and would be being negative.

However, Sales of goods outside the EU are VAT free, so sales from the EU to the UK will become VAT free. Sellers have to declare to their local customs office that they have made a duty free sale. When the truck reaches the EU border (Calais/Zeebrugge/Le Havre) it has to obtain a proof of export (POE) from the customs. Copies of this are retained locally, sent back to the customs house local to the seller, given to the haulier (driver) and sent back to the seller. If the copy does not turn up at his local customs house and if the seller cannot produce a copy (either his or his haulier's) then he (the seller) is deemed responsible to pay the VAT since the goods are considered as having not been exported.

In order to generate the PEO customs will have to fully open up all trucks and check the manifest against the goods - much more rigorous checks than currently made by UK immigration looking for illegal immigrants.

All of this will snarl up Calais and slow down the movement of goods. When the goods are imported into the UK, HMRC will want to apply VAT to the imported goods. Those without an HMRS account will have to stump up cash before the goods are released. This process might happen in Calais but to the best of my knowledge there is nothing in the Le Touquet treaty that covers customs - and of course the next president might chose to tear up the agreement, let's hope not (thinking positive). So it might have to happen in Dover/Cheriton.

The big question is how would the UK treat exports from the UK to Europe, but I am going to suggest that the most likely scenario is that HMRC would apply the current rules drawing a border around the UK. Anything more complex would likely need a completely new software package - and we all know the Government track record on software packages. Much easier to say then that some 30 odd countries in the EU and EAA join the rest of the world as export markets delivered VAT free. Thus the same process would apply in the reverse direction - except that the procedures would have to be done in the UK - unless there was a Le Touquet2 agreement.

That is why I see the channel ports and Cheriton getting into a major snarl up. No negativity about what the future will bring, just the facts as they are now applied to a new border.

Incidentally the border between Turkey and Bulgaria usually has more than 24 hour queues for freight, though I am sure the Brits can do better.

PS Don't even ask me to speculate how the border between Eire and Northern Ireland will work. All I can think of is that it will become a smugglers' paradise - opportunities for Chancer perhaps.
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More what ifs and maybe

Give it up Andy it's boring. The only more boring forum person is the nasty party supporter on another forum who continually accuses anybody who doesn't agree with him of making personal attacks on him.
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Sorry Nick

no ifs no buts no maybes

Them's the rules as they apply.

Please feel free to bury your head in the sand as deep as you will.

It is not project fear.

It is reality and not ivory towers of might be in the future.

Please feel free to show me how it is wrong rather than dismissive platitudes - but I do have 40 years working in exactly this area of business.
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PS

and yes it is a lot of boring sh1t that actually makes your life easier - even though you never see it.

That is 99% of what the EU was about - shame people were never allowed to see it for what it was and only ever saw Murdoch's view..
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Last night I watched a program recorded earlier about the reasons people had voted for Brexit. Time and time again they came back to EU immigration as their main reason. This did not seem to be racially motivated but more triggered by a lack of infrastructure resources in their area - housing, school places and jobs being the items most often highlighted coupled with a feeling that Government ignored them. Now that we have taken the decision to leave it seems essential to me that more money is spent on these relatively deprived areas and less on tax breaks for the very rich if we want to avoid social disharmony.

The decision has been taken and in order to make the best of it we need to close the divides in our country and move forward together. We need to be properly prepared for the tough negotiations ahead in order to get the best possible deal. We need to have policies that a majority of people can support and ot those favoured by the extremists on either edge of the political spectrum
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[quote user="alittlebitfrench"]I thought you did not 'do' other forums Nicky P.

Go on, who are you talking about ? LOL.[/quote]

I don't participate but the ability to read and format opinions is available to anybody. I notice that you appear to be among the missing these days.
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andyh4, longevity of service or attendance is no criterion to prove ones knowledge. I think your bitterness about your disinfranchisement is more a pointer towards you warped views or should I say hoped for forecasts. What ever happens I live in the UK and although disappointed in the result, I believe in democracy and accept what happened. Now along with others will make the most of the situation and look forward to the future with out constantly berating or trying to belittle those who voted for what they thought was correct.
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