Letters to the Spalding Guardian Editor – August 19, 2020
Immediate impact of leaving EU could be considerable
One can sympathise with those workers facing potential unemployment at Bakkavor in Spalding but portents of the future have be discernible for some time.
Data from consumer research, food retailers and the food processing industry have identified long term changes in the pattern in food consumption in the UK.
The British are eating less red meat but more chicken and pork, less root vegetables (last year Britain imported almost half the potatoes we consumed), more exotic salad vegetables, different food grains (rice and wheat pasta).
Many of the ingredients of the processed food we eat are not produced in the UK. With heavy investment in technology and low cost alternative energy we could do so but at uncompetitive prices compared to imports.
Freshness is a powerful sales incentive for food products.
Currently quality ingredients for processed foods can be imported from southern Europe. They can be picked, transported to South Lincolnshire processed.
packaged and dispatched to retailers distribution centres in 36 hours.
They can legitimately be claimed to be fresh. Deal or no trade deal, there will be customs checks. Disruption to the just-in-time flow will increase costs.
Before officially joining the then Common Market the UK had signed up to a treaty to regulate the cross border flow of heavy goods vehicles. The free movement of goods made ratification an irrelevance until after the referendum.
Under the term of that Treaty the UK has an allocation for 4,400 UK HGVs to take loads into the EU and bring back a full or partial load reducing transport costs. A mutually beneficial solution will eventually be agreed. The immediate impact on moving raw and processed food could be considerable, increasing costs.
Mark Carney when Governor of the Bank of England, commissioned research though its Regional Agencies and relevant experts of the employee skills sets most at risk from Artificially Intelligent Robotic Automation development. Two of the top three skills sets at risk were agricultural and food processing workers.
Britain’s new inmigration policy will choke off the supply of incentivised differently skilled migrant workers. South Lincolnshire has a low unemployment rate. For businesses, upward pressure on employment costs could incentivise management to relocate operations or to invest in A.I. robotics.
The chancellor has said it will not be possible to save all jobs. Business managers have a fiduciary duty to protect the interests of the business owners, the share holders,and a responsibility to uphold their contractual agreements with their employees.
Post SARScoV2 and Brexit we should all work at reforging a new forward looking workplace relationship.
Paul M. Walls
Spalding
End of October could be a watershed
With the full lockdown measures in place for the whole of April and May, the impact on the used car market, albeit devastating, is not surprising.
According to the latest figures recently released by the Society Of Motor Traders & Manufacturers (SMMT) , the market for second-hand cars declined by almost half in the second quarter of the year, with just over one million units changing hands.
As the lockdown eases and private buyers and sellers get back on the move, we hope to see more activity returning in the coming months, particularly as many people see vehicles as a safer and more reliable way to travel during the pandemic.
More worrying, however, is the news last week that the UK economy suffered its biggest decline on record in quarter two. Big ticket purchases such as cars inevitably take a disproportionately bigger knock in downturns so much will depend on how quickly the economy can recover.
We all hope for a V shape, but a U shape looks more likely, and, in particular, the effect on business and consumer confidence as the inevitable cross-economy job losses kick in as the Government furlough scheme tapers out. For many reasons, the end of October could be a watershed.
For now, economic uncertainty reigns, exacerbated by the looming end to the Brexit transition period, now just a few months away. Whilst we know we are leaving the single market and customs union, businesses still don’t know the terms of trading beyond the end of this year. We continue to call for ambitious tariff-free FTA-and one suspects this is increasingly coming down to political will, but we are also doing what we can to help.
Regular COVID-19 webinars are now being refocused on preparedness as the SMMT meet later this week with representatives from the Home Office , who will discuss the Government’s EU Settlement Scheme and what companies can do to support EU nationals in their workforce. They will also provide insight into the UK’s new Points Based Immigration System, which comes into force on January 1.
Rodney Sadd
South Holland & The Deepings CLP
Stand up to Westminster
Regarding your story: ‘The homes and jobs we need - but at what cost?’ Successful and sustainable communities enjoy a variety of different land uses within their area: housing, parks and green spaces, shops, leisure,hospitals, schools, all in close proximity.
The idea that you can parcel up the surface of our country into different categories and then allow developers free rein is self-evident nonsense. Our councillors may not always do a great job of listening to what we think, but they are at least accountable to us, and can in principle be voted
out by us.
But if developers are allowed to ride rough-shod over local opinion, who is going to ensure that they take the needs of walkers and cyclists into account in planning their estates?
Who is going to monitor the quality of the homes they produce, and that they are energy-efficient? Who is going to make sure that they are affordable?
Local authorities don’t deliberately hold up planning applications in order to be awkward. Planning permission has been given in recent years to developers across the country for hundreds of thousands of homes which they’ve never actually built.
This is surely a more urgent problem.
In Spalding we have brownfield sites in need of redevelopment which have blighted our town for decades, but which developers are not interested in because greenfield sites are much cheaper to develop.
I suspect the Government already knows that these proposals are unworkable as they stand, but they are softening us up for another attack on local government and local democracy.
We need our local councillors to be prepared to put their heads above the parapet and tell their friends in Westminster that these plans must be dropped.
Martin Blake
South Lincs Green Party