London Gateway moved more than 3m teu in 2025, up 52% from 1.9m teu, and the British Ports Association says that surge — not carbon-dodging — explains why UK container traffic jumped 11% last year. Brussels begs to differ, and the gap between those two views is now a regulatory problem.

The BPA has rejected findings from Spain's EU ETS Observatory linking rising UK container activity to the bloc's Emissions Trading System. In a new report, the association argues that new capacity, changing liner networks and ordinary commercial competition offer more convincing explanations — and that proposed EU anti-evasion measures risk penalising billions of pounds of investment in British terminals.

What actually moved the boxes?

Government figures show UK ports handled an additional 600,000 containers last year. London accounted for roughly 500,000 of them. Around 85% of the UK's container traffic growth in 2025 was concentrated in the capital, following the opening of DP World's £350m ($465m) fourth berth at London Gateway in late 2024.

The berth boosted capacity by more than a third. Then Gemini Cooperation — the Maersk and Hapag-Lloyd alliance — started calling in February 2025 with Asia-Europe services. That's not subtle. Maersk's departure from Hutchison-operated Felixstowe reshaped the national box market on its own, and DP World is pressing ahead with a further £1bn ($1.33bn) expansion adding two all-electric berths and a second rail terminal.

The BPA's complaint, in essence, is that all this has been overlooked by analysts pointing at EU carbon pricing instead.

What does the dispute turn on?

It turns on a metric. Research by Spain's Puertos del Estado found the UK's share of northern European deepsea shipping activity, measured in teu-miles, rose from 17.5% in 2023 to 32.1% by July 2025. Later analysis put it near 36% in the first quarter of 2026, broadly mirroring declines in Germany and the Netherlands.

The Spanish study also estimated 76% of observed route changes were attributable to the EU ETS. That figure has travelled far. The BPA isn't buying it.

The association argues teu-miles combine vessel capacity with voyage distance — they measure shipping network activity, not containers actually handled. Longer voyages around the Cape of Good Hope or shuffled port-call sequences can distort the numbers. Nor, the BPA says, does the available analysis isolate ETS effects from alliance restructuring, congestion and new terminal capacity.

Continental ports haven't uniformly lost ground, either. Rotterdam's throughput rose 3.1% to 14.2m teu in 2025, Hamburg grew 7.3% to 8.3m teu, and Antwerp-Bruges eked out 0.7%.

What would the EU rules change?

The European Commission proposed tightening anti-evasion rules in July. Certain container ports within 150 nautical miles of an EU port could be excluded from the definition of a port of call for emissions accounting. The transhipment threshold for other qualifying non-EU ports within 300 nautical miles would drop from 65% to 50%.

Together, those changes could pull more British terminals into the EU's anti-evasion framework — raising carbon costs for lines calling at them. The proposals haven't been adopted yet.

"It would be extraordinary if the EU responded to that success by introducing new measures to penalise British ports," said Mark Simmins — rather, Mark Simmonds, the BPA's director of policy and external affairs. The association supports shipping decarbonisation, it says, but warns against treating normal port competition as regulatory avoidance.

There's an irony here worth savouring: Britain already brought domestic shipping and emissions in UK ports into its own emissions trading scheme from July, and it's weighing extending carbon pricing to international voyages from 2028. The UK is pricing carbon too — just not on Brussels's timetable.

The BPA has urged the UK government and the Commission to reassess the evidence before adopting measures that could dent port competitiveness and future investment on both sides of the Channel. With adoption still pending and the 2026 teu-mile data climbing, expect this argument to get louder before it gets resolved.