Interview with Mr. van Bockel, Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure

11.5.2017: CBRA Interview with Mr. Roeland van Bockel, Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment, on supply chain security regulations and standards, and beyond.

 

Thanks Roeland for joining CBRA Interview. Do you recall why and where we first met?

We met first in 2005. Between 2004-2008, I worked as a seconded national expert from the Netherlands at the European Commission. My task was to develop legislation that pieced together the already approved EU legislation on maritime and port security and extend it to surface freight transport.

We met at DG TREN. You identified yourself as a Ph.D student, researching the cost benefit for business to invest in transport security measures. At the time, the EC had outsourced consulting work to DNV, advising the EC on the most appropriate security mechanism to cover all surface transport modes especially focussing on terrorist threats. In 2005, we proposed to the EU Parliament and the EU Member States a kind of EU self regulatory legislation. This proposal for a “Regulation on enhancing supply chain security” allowed companies that met certain security quality criteria with a secure operator Status. These quality criteria referred to measures, being the measures taken by the operators, to safeguard the integrity of the supply chain for their part of the chain.

 

What happened with this proposal for Regulation on enhancing supply chain security?

To cut a long story short, this draft EU Regulation failed to be agreed by the EU Member States. As the legislation was to have an impact on 1.7 million EU companies, there appeared to be no common sense of urgency in Europe for this kind of all embracing supply chain security approach. In 2006, just after the EU Member States and the Parliament had approved the EU Customs legislation on the Authorised Economic Operator, EU AEO, we put the discussion of the proposal on hold.

 

What did you do after your job at the EC?

In 2008 I became a project manager of a EU FP 7 Research project on inland waterways transport “Platina”, tasked with infrastructure issues including virtual infrastructure – River Information Services. I also took up the responsibility of developing a CEN standard on supply chain security. In 2012 this led to a CEN standard for Reporting Crime Incidents in logistics and a CEN SCS Good practice handbook. You and your associates at the Cross-border Research Association substantially contributed to this work.

 

What came after this CEN work?

In 2012, I became the project coordinator of the TEN-T AnNa project, that focussed on enabling 14 EU Member States to develop a Maritime Single Window for electronic ship reporting. The focus was the digitalisation of transport. The principle being reporting once, multiple use. The need for EU Member States to develop a Single Window was to implement EU Directive reporting formalities (2010/65/EU). This stimulated business to report data electronically and administrations to receive data in an electronic format and to work together. An especially important feature being the need to develop a Single Window in an efficient way, that is value for money, optimal usage of IT legacy and smooth interconnectivity between various systems. Many influential parties were involved, including the ports and the European Commission. Both using this legal opportunity to strengthening it’s coordination tasks respectively in the perspective of smart ports and of an all-embracing EU Maritime Information Systems, EMSA, covering safety, environmental and security issues.

 

What keeps you occupied these days?

In 2016, after having worked 12 years in Brussels, I returned to the Netherlands. Currently my main occupation at the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and the Environment relates to the digitalisation in logistics and the development of a Single Window for Trade and Transport. It’s again a task that requires some endurance as it focuses on the need for administrations to co-operate and to develop an interoperable and understandable IT language that allows smooth data exchange between business and administrations. Fostering paperless transport of goods, I keep myself also busy in managing projects. In addition, the Dutch innovation in logistics goes hand in hand with cross border trade. Therefore, we support the development of an EU Digital Single Market and promote sophisticated trade facilitating approaches within the context of Union Customs Code. In my work, security remains an important theme. Without sufficient data security and privacy, smooth logistics interoperability is an illusion.

 

Thanks a lot Roeland for this interesting interview, and see you again this summer!