He said: “Loans to speculative investments in infrastructure may generate the returns that you expect – [but] it may not.”
Ninety per cent of containerised cargo enters Britain via Hutchison Ports-owned Felixstowe and Southampton and DP World’s London Gateway. However, 60pc of it ends up north of a line between the Severn and the Wash.
Mr Huck said: “It suits the dominant players among the global container lines, the big port operators and the train operating companies, but it doesn’t work for the country in terms of customer costs, carbon emissions or traffic congestion.”
‘The Victorians had it right’
A shift of container flows would mark a return to an historic balance that saw Liverpool become the second port of the empire in the 19th century, a situation that prevailed until the early 1970s.
Britain’s original container ports were at Tilbury and Liverpool, before they were gradually displaced by the opening of Felixstowe to the biggest ships in the 1980s and 1990s, followed by Southampton and finally London Gateway in 2013.
Mr Huck said: “The Victorians had it right. There was London and there was Liverpool. If we want cargo to go to the point of consumption, that’s still the most efficient model.”
So far, there is little sign that the Government is receptive to this message. It was an eagerness to expand port capacity in the South East that forced the Government into a humiliating climbdown last month.
Louise Haigh, the Transport Secretary, called DP World’s P&O Ferries a “rogue operator” and urged a consumer boycott, only for DP to respond by threatening to delay a £1bn investment in London Gateway. It forced Sir Keir Starmer to disavow Ms Haigh’s comments in order to save a flagship summit designed to show that Britain was open for business.
Peel Ports acquired Liverpool through its £770m purchase of Mersey Docks and Harbour in 2005, when it had a single terminal at Seaforth at the mouth of the Mersey. The port has since doubled in size with the opening of a £400m second terminal in 2016 that stretches out into the river.
The new terminal was expanded in 2020 and is equipped with the latest handling equipment, including rail-mounted gantry cranes that can unload a ship 20 containers wide.
Terminal 1, meanwhile, specialises in short-sea and intra-European shipments, as well as trans-Atlantic markets, where ships smaller than those used on Asian routes tend to be deployed.
Mr Huck said: “It’s as good as anywhere you will find in the UK, but while we’ve seen storing growth, it’s still about one-third utilised. So the capacity is there to do something different.”
Liverpool currently handles about 800,000 TEUs – 20-foot equivalent units, the standard measure in the containers market – a year and has capacity for 2m. Felixstowe processes 3.3m, Southampton 1.8m and London Gateway 1.5m.
One argument in favour of the status quo is that established shipping routes from East Asia head up the English Channel to ports such as Rotterdam and Hamburg, making stops in locations such as Southampton or Felixstowe more convenient than Liverpool.
