Customs refutes smuggling claim
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by Lee Kimber • Customs and Excise officials are pouring scorn on brewery Whitbread's claim that a massive undercover haulage industry is smuggling 8 million pints of beer into Britain every week.
Whitbread claims that its surveillance of Dover and Calais discovered that up to 900 vans and lorries are carrying more than a million pints of beer into Britain every day. The black market beer is sold to discount off-licences and at car boot sales for £1 a litre.
"We saw 377 British lorries loading at one outlet alone in Calais," says Whitbread strategic affairs director Simon Ward. "You could see it yourself if you went over there today."
He adds that Whitbread's "snoops" saw drivers loading two pallets of beer in their trucks—far more than the 110 litres allowed for personal consumption.
More than 500 vans, many of them hired, are smuggling beer but truck drivers are a bigger threat to breweries because they make a bigger profit per load, according to Ward.
But a Customs and Excise spokesman refutes Whitbread's claim that a third of the beer coming into the UK is smuggled and that 45% is destined to be sold outside the South-east.
"You'd have to be pretty well organised to make a profit out of a long run to, say. Wales," he says. "We would reject it because our investigations don't really support that."
He says the number of tipoffs received by customs investigators is a better indicator of the extent of the trade.