When Doug Bannister told his family he would be joining the Port of Dover as its chief executive, weeks before the original March 2019 Brexit date, his father-in-law voiced what many might have thought: “Are you mad?”
The softly spoken American clearly isn’t one to shy away from a daunting task, including taking over at Britain’s busiest port during what he calls the “once in a generation” change in the country’s trading relationship with its closest neighbours.
As negotiations dragged on, Brexit was delayed for another year, but when it came, the change was seismic. “It was such a significant transformation that the nation was going through, and Dover is the epicentre of that activity. And I did sign up for that,” Bannister says.
Even if, on arrival, he was pleasantly surprised at the port’s preparations for Brexit, he never could have forecast the other storm clouds gathering on the horizon. Covid repeatedly disrupted traffic on Britain’s busiest trade route, halted most leisure travel for two years, and even saw France close its border in December 2020 to all travellers, including truck drivers, from England.
The drop-off in traffic put pressure on the finances of the port, run by the Dover Harbour Board, which was granted a royal charter in 1606. It does not have any external shareholders, and its “trust port” status prevented it from tapping investors or going to the capital markets to raise cash during the pandemic.
Freight traffic has largely returned to pre-Brexit, pre-pandemic levels at the UK’s most important “ro-ro” port (so named because vehicles roll on and roll off the ships), Bannister says, although leisure travel has been recovering more slowly. A third of all the UK’s trade in goods with the EU is handled by Dover, according to the latest figures from consultancy Oxera, which translates to a value of about £144bn. About 10,000 lorries travel through it each day – 31% of all the HGVs that visit UK seaports.
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CV
Age 57
Family Married with four children, three of whom live with him in Kent, while his eldest daughter lives in the US.
Education BA in economics at St Lawrence University in New York state; MBA at Seton Hall University in New Jersey.
Pay Basic salary of £300,000. In 2020 he was paid an additional £122,000 in bonuses, pension contributions and benefits.
Last holiday Devon, last summer: “It was glorious.”
Best advice he’s been given “Go into any change positively.” He believes “an early positive attitude” about change, “combined with early engagement, generally leads to a better outcome”.
Biggest career mistake “I think I was not a good father to my first daughter. I was spending so much time working and travelling around the world for work that I missed her childhood. I have a very good relationship with her now.”
Word he overuses “I probably use the word ‘wicked’ a lot.”
How he relaxes Spending time with his children and in the garden.
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Bannister says he “fell into” his long maritime career after taking a job with small shipping group Trans Freight Lines in the US, following a degree in economics. The 57-year-old would go on to work at P&O’s container shipping division before it merged with Dutch line Royal Nedlloyd and was subsequently bought by the Danish giant Maersk.
His latest challenge has arrived out of a clear blue sky: as we pulled up outside the passenger cruise terminal, an enormous symbol of it hove into view. P&O Ferries’ hulking Spirit of Britain hasn’t travelled anywhere since the company sacked 800 workers on 17 March. The 213-metre-long ferry, one of the largest operating in Europe, would usually only dock briefly at Dover during its five daily round trips between Kent and northern France.
“We were looking forward to increasing passenger trade as Covid travel restrictions eased off, and so it is going to be difficult to handle that having the P&O ferries off the route. We hope they get them back sailing again in time for Easter, if not in time for the summer,” Bannister says.
While P&O Ferries’ ships remain tied up, rival operators have scrambled to take extra passengers, with the port helping coordinate. Despite this, Bannister appears reluctant to pass judgment on the firm – whose chief executive effectively admitted breaching employment law by dismissing his staff without notice – or on the wider issue of rates of pay for international seafarers.
Assessing wages for crew is not always straightforward as “frequently international seafarers don’t pay any income taxes, because they are not a part of any particular nation,” Bannister says. “Some routes are different, like domestic routes like the Isle of Wight or maybe up in the Scottish islands. It’s not necessarily a straight apples for apples comparison, but I do think it is right that people should get paid for the work that they do in the best way that they can be.”
Even before the P&O scandal, port traffic had been repeatedly disrupted during the first weeks of the year, including by the introduction of new EU import controls, increased freight traffic, roadworks and a reduction in ferry services as vessels were refitted.
Traffic was flowing freely on the day the Observer visited, and there was no sign of the queue of lorries frequently seen snaking up the A20 road, which winds down to the coast. Bannister believes this is partly due to traders and hauliers getting used to new requirements, which include time-consuming passport and paperwork checks.
He concedes a consequence of Brexit is longer processing times at the border. “There will be improvements which are made. People will get slicker at reading passports, get slicker at lodging paperwork and checking paperwork. But we are in a different trading regime.”
An impending change, which could again lead to queues at the port, is also weighing on Bannister’s mind. In September, the EU intends to introduce airport-style biometric checks at its external borders. This would affect Dover because of “juxtaposed controls”, where travellers clear French entry requirements before leaving the UK, and he has called on the British government to work with the EU on a solution.
“To date, no process has been identified for a carload of people transiting a busy ferry terminal on a dark stormy night,” he says. “It would force people to exit their vehicles in busy moving traffic, which would be dangerous. We couldn’t allow that to happen.”
Over the centuries, Dover has capitalised on its “geographic advantage” of being located just 22 miles across the Channel from France. Bannister is convinced the recent bounceback in trade highlights the success of the “short straits”: the shortest distance between the UK and the continent. “The market has chosen,” he says. “We have three different ferry operators operating from the port, two ports in France to go to, and then the Eurotunnel running alongside us.”
Bannister’s career has taken him on a circumnavigation of the globe from his home state of New Jersey to the island of Jersey – where he ran the airport and harbours – via Rotterdam, Australia (his favourite place to live and work) and New Zealand. Now, he clearly gets a kick out of working for an organisation as rich in history as this one, despite the varied challenges since he took up the role in Dover.
“It’d be nice if there were a few less disruptions,” he says. “This business has been around for 400 years; it’s got incredible heritage. It’ll be here for another 400 years.”
