As you may have seen in the news, the workers at Felixstowe port are due to strike for eight days after pay talks broke down. The industrial action is due to bring the port to a standstill between Sunday the 21st and Monday the 29th of August.
Unfortunately, if these strikes go ahead as planned, there will be large scale disruption. It’s difficult to be precise about the scale of the delays to individual shipments arriving during (or soon after) this time but we think that the below measures may be taken by the shipping lines to allow them to maintain their future schedules:
• Vessels may change their port rotation: This means that if the plan was to call into Felixstowe before continuing to mainland Europe on their west-bound journey, the vessel may switch this plan and go to Europe first, before returning to the UK as they travel east. In the past we’ve seen delays of 14 days or so with this option.
• Vessels may change their UK port of discharge: If there’s spare capacity at Southampton or at one of the London ports, the shipping line may divert to one of these alternatives in order to discharge the containers destined for Felixstowe. This may be an option for a few vessels but there won’t be spare capacity to take all vessels destined for Felixstowe during the eight days of industrial action.
• We feel that a worst case scenario may see shipping lines off loading containers that were destined for the UK, in other countries: When port congestion in the UK was at critical levels this option was selected by multiple shipping lines. If this happens, containers could be in mainland Europe or even Africa (Morocco has been used as a port to unload containers to the UK) for a number of weeks until they can be recovered on a vessel with space to bring them to the UK.
Shippo will ensure that we are on top of each shipment under our control and will ensure that customers are given individual updates on the situation that their shipment(s) find themselves.
For more info on how this could affect your shipment please feel free to contact the team on 0203 384 0498 or info@shippo.co.uk