Besides these negative impacts, the Lithuanian hauliers draw attention to the fact that the package’s requirements will not be applied in practice to non-EU hauliers. The EU hauliers fear that they will face distortion of competition, while the Russian, Belarusian and other third-country hauliers will take over a large share of the EU’s freight from the European hauliers, further complicating their post-pandemic recovery.
According to Tomas Jurgelevičius, Secretary-General of Lithuania’s International Transport and Logistics Alliance, there is still no mechanism in place that could ensure implementation of the Mobility Package in the non-EU countries.
“Many European hauliers associations and other stakeholders have been consistently reiterating that the Mobility Package and in particular its obligation on the return home of trucks every 8 weeks manifestly runs counter the EU’s key goals and will cause severe damage to the EU Single Market, it will also considerably increase the carbon footprint of the road transport sector and discriminate EU’s periphery against the centre. All of these negative impacts will be further aggravated due to the unsolved issue of the third countries. There are no legal instruments making the package’s requirements applicable to non-EU hauliers, so they will be able to disregard them and continue freight operations in Europe under the permit system. Competing directly with the third-country undertakings, EU’s peripheral transport operators will suffer the most.” said Jurgelevičius.
According to him, in the past years, there has been a significant growth of the third-country, in particular Russian, freight turnover in the EU. In 2018, Russian road freight in Europe was 39% higher than in 2014. Pursuant to the data from the Russian state authorities, certain Western European countries increased their permit quota for the Russian hauliers. For example, in 2019 Belgium increased its permit quota for Russia by 30% and by 40% in 2020. In the period from 2016 to 2019, France increased the number of permits by 45% while Spain – by 37%.
“Since no mechanism to ensure enforcement of the requirements to the third countries has been provided in the Mobility Package, the volumes of EU freight of these hauliers can continue unhindered increase – that is at the cost of Lithuania and other peripheral EU Member States,” Jurgelevičius added.
He explained that non-EU hauliers are able to compete on the European market with lower prices and are not obliged to apply most of the EU regulations. For example, the third-country hauliers are not subject to the legislation on admission to occupation, driver qualification requirements and EU transport taxes and excise duty.
As stated in the PWC study, given the absence of border within the EU, checks on freight permits for non-EU hauliers are haphazard and ineffective. This allows third-country entrepreneurs to transport additional cargo by road, by evading the system of permit quotas both in bilateral relationship and in the services of so-called third countries.
According to Jurgelevičius, the EU must also take into consideration that by surrendering market positions to the third-country hauliers, the EU opens up to the increasing numbers of much higher emission trucks on the EU roads. Based on the ECMT permit statistics, the share of the highest environmental class Euro 6 trucks in the fleet of the third countries is small compared to the hauliers from the EU’s periphery. The international road operations of the third-country hauliers involving Euro 6 standard trucks comprise some 15-30%, whereas this number amounts to 77% in Poland and 62% in Lithuania
