How we’re dealing with Brexit  

By Stuart Wilkinson, Sales and Marketing Director 

Wilkinson Containers is a bridge between packaging manufacturers and our customers.  We provide our customers with the confidence that they can secure the packaging formats they need within five working days – rather than the four-to-eight-week lead time which would be the standard norm for a packaging manufacturer. 

This means that when it comes to Brexit, P. Wilkinson Containers has had to be ultra-prepared.  

One thing we’ve benefitted from over last 18 months is a number of Brexit ‘dress rehearsals’. Each time the Brexit deadline has loomed such as last year when we were planning to leave the EU before an extension was secured, we made sure that our warehouse was full and our most popular products were in stock. 

We hold both general and bespoke stock at our site in Bermondsey and we have a responsibility to continue to supply our customers with what they need, in turn helping the wheels of industry turning.   

Through our experience we were able to anticipate some of the upcoming difficulties and increased our stock levels of our core lines. This same experience came into effect during the pandemic when we were able to ‘pick up’ extra stock from some of our suppliers in Northern Italy and Spain before they entered the lockdown. 

We’ve even invested in products where we did not have a guaranteed order to ensure supply was uninterrupted for our customers.   

Ahead of this year’s Brexit deadline, we’ve been picking up stock levels again and have spent lots of time understanding how new import rules from Europe will affect our business.   

As part of the EU, we benefitted from free movement of goods, but now there will be more paperwork as products enter new tax tariffs. Essentially, there’s paperwork when goods leave the country of origin and then more when it enters the UK.  

We’re finding that there just isn’t enough people at the borders to process this paperwork which is caused by a lack of understanding – and that’s what has led to delays at the borders.  

However, it’s our job to manage the new import process so that our customers don’t have to and have peace of mind that when they need additional packaging, it’s here waiting for them.