The Conservatives’ Quality of Life Working Group has come up with what it calls a “Blueprint for a green economy". It covers a huge range of topics, but does mention road freight and the supply chain. It is quite sensible about road freight. It acknowledges that trucks of less than 10 tonnes can produce up to five times more carbon than the most efficient large HGVs "which are only slightly more polluting than freight trains,” it says. That sounds very understanding about trucks.
And it adds: “A future government should also look again at the current restrictions on freight vehicles to see whether the balance struck between size, axle weight, and road wear is the optimum to deliver the lowest carbon footprint.” To me that sounds like support for longer and heavier trucks. Such support is remarkable given that this is a green review.
But then it goes wrong. It says:
One promising model we would like to see followed up is the grouping of deliveries according to final destination. A Regional Distribution Centre (RDC) would allow large trucks to break bulk outside the city and transfer loads to smaller less polluting vehicles that make local deliveries to city centre locations much more efficiently in terms of cost, congestion and pollution. So if a retail chain needs to make deliveries to each of 20 branches across an urban area all the deliveries would now probably be made using one single HGV, stopping 20 times and getting emptier and emptier after each stop. An RDC plan would allow the HGV to stop just once.
This is just wrong.
Regional distribution centres already do this. It would be more inefficient to have to use another distribution centre just outside a city. The best way is to run full as full loads as possible from RDC to customer. Moving to smaller loads on smaller vehicles would just make it highly inefficient and the smaller vehicles would pollute more than the big vehicles.
On the food supply chain, there is a call for the creation of 'The Food Supply Chain', bringing together the various delivery bodies. The bad news here is that it would operate out of DEFRA at a national level. If DEFRA does for transport what it has done for farming, then we might as well all shut up shop.
What would be better would be if the major supermarkets shared distribution using white vehicles to maximise load fill.
Incidentally this is a huge 549 page document. If you want to go straight to the bit about haulage, go to page 333 and if you want to hear about The Supply Chain Service, head for page 184. There is also lots about rail, sea, air and river freight.