+ Visit Cardiff FC for Latest News, Transfer Gossip, Fixtures and Match Results |
Travelled around a 1000 miles on the French roads last week.
Was very surprised to see zero British lorries carrying all these goods we export to the EU.
If you travel round the UK roads (I do) . You will see around 1 in 8 lorries is foreign.
How do we export our goods, in the boot of foreign cars?
There will be a lot of British goods which go back in the lorries from the continent which have brought other goods here. I think the issue of a lack of British lorries (if true) is more to do with how many foreign number plates you'd expect to see in the EU compared to just GB plates.
Hope the new business is going well!
when we went to france last year, i remarked the same, saw a few UK cars ( afterall we were doing a fairly well driven tourist route) but never saw 1 UK lorry
my only answer was the UK companies use EU lorry's are they are cheaper ? ? ?, i dont know though
Also, you forgot that we have a strong services sector, and a lot of our exports come from that
Could be back loading
Exactly this. Balance of trade. There are a surplus of empty continental lorries in the UK which need return export loads. We export over 50% of our product, mainly to Germany & France. All of it goes on European lorries as it costs around 65% of the cost of exporting with a British companies who don't have return loads.
So.
I will summarise.
We must stay in the EU so the European lorry drivers can take our goods over to the EU?
Unfortunately there are so many coming over here dropping of their goods we cannot afford to compete to deliver our goods into Europe.
Are you being deliberately daft? The company I worked for employed Gerry Thomas haulage to take the goods that were then loaded onto containers that were then shipped to wherever. Those containers were then transported via rail and road by local companies.
It wouldn't make sense to transport the goods by sea then get GJT Haulage to drive over to complete the trip via road.