The FEFC has made the following announcement regarding imports into UK ports. Please be advised that OOCL will apply the new surcharge to all shipments with ‘Onboard Date’ (rather than container discharge date) of 7th December 2007 onwards. The Republic of Ireland will be excluded from this charge.
“The growth in cargo carried by the FEFC into the U.K. for the first eight months of 2007 has increased by almost 15% over the same period in 2006, and has averaged 485 TEUs per day for the year to date.
Together with substantial growth seen in other trades, this level of increase has created congestion not only at the major U.K. terminals, but has also caused congestion of the inland transport and delivery systems. On occasions, Lines have found it necessary to by-pass U.K. ports and feed cargo to the United Kingdom, and in some cases divert their vessels to non-scheduled ports and equalise the costs from these ports. This has created even more congestion for an infrastructure that is already overloaded. The infrastructure congestion has also made it very difficult to repatriate much needed empty containers to Asia.
In meeting these, and other operational problems, FEFC members have incurred substantial extra costs in supplying their liner services to customers.
The study undertaken by the Lines has identified major cost increases in vessel operations, transhipment of cargo and port equalisation. The aggregated increased costs identified by the study amount to an extra cost of USD 145.00/TEU and in order to recover this amount the FEFC will announce a U.K. Congestion Charge of USD 145/TEU applicable to the westbound trade for all containers discharged on or after 1st December 2007. The costs will be reviewed after 60 days and adjusted as necessary.
While the congestion situation in the U.K. is the most immediate problem faced by the Lines they are deeply concerned at the current situation and the possibility of increased congestion in both Northern Europe and the Mediterranean. This will become worse, as the continued high growth rates expected in 2008 and 2009 will add ever increasing volumes of containers to the already overloaded infrastructure throughout Europe.
The Lines will monitor this situation on an ongoing basis.
On behalf of the Lines of the FEFC.”
