With one third of all lorries running empty on the UK’s roads and East Anglia hauliers reporting it is costing them millions, BETHANY WALES asks what the industry needs to fix the problem.
In the UK, heavy goods vehicles (HGVs) travel totally empty for more than three billion miles every year, according to the Department for Transport (DfT).
That is the equivalent of driving to the moon and back 6,500 times - or more than 5,000 years of driving.
Not only is this calamitous for the environment but for haulage businesses it means accruing costs without generating any income – which, in this era of soaring fuel prices, is especially painful.
Tremayne Johnson, operations director at Bartrums Group, a freight company on the Norfolk Suffolk border, said the issue was “the biggest challenge hauliers face”, and that minimising empty miles was “the difference between being profitable or going under”.
So, what exactly is going on? And why are businesses here in East Anglia at a particular disadvantage to those in other regions?
EMPTY MILES
To understand why so many lorries are running empty, it is important to understand how haulage companies operate.
Nine times out of 10, Mr Johnson said customers are looking for a one-way trip for their goods.
That means that while the outward journey is paid for, the return leg back to East Anglia isn’t.
And while haulage companies have excellent contacts in their home county, they often lack a customer base elsewhere, making it hard to fill returning trucks.
What’s more, he said that although local hauliers benefit from the abundance of goods leaving the Port of Felixstowe, the lack of industrial activity here in Norfolk and Suffolk means it is often one-sided.
As a result, many companies struggle to make a return journey pay.
He said: “There's almost certainly more coming out of the region than there is coming back in.
“That’s problematic in that it creates a huge amount of competition for those return loads.
“It’s not that the haulage industry is lazy or doesn’t care about running empty miles, but you’ve got all these companies trying to maximise profit with very limited opportunities to do so.”
For companies like Bartrums, solving the issue could be worth millions.
Mr Johnson estimates that if you converted all their empty miles into paid ones, it would be worth “several million pounds a year” for the business.
LOGICAL NEXT STEP
The solution to the problem might be simple, but, Mr Johnson said, it would not be easy.
He said: “The key to solving it really would be better collaboration between companies.
“If we could plug all the information about who’s running where and when, then it would be a whole lot easier to see where the gaps are and fill them.
“But the problem is that the industry finds it hard to collaborate because its constituent parts are competing companies who need to look after their own interests.
“And the reality is that if this was run more efficiently, there would be fewer miles to go around.”
While there is a smattering of websites acting as intermediaries between hauliers and potential out-of-area customers, Mr Johnson said they tended to be low-tech, and weren’t set up to cope with the scale of the problem.
But, with artificial intelligence on the rise, he envisions a future where a collaborative approach could become the default.
He said: “The logical next step for the industry would be to have all the jobs entered one system, which allows businesses to actively trade work.
“Anything that allows trucks to run more efficiently, in theory, will make businesses more profitable, as well as driving that Co2 footprint down.
“Improving fuel efficiency and reducing empty running are the cornerstones of profitability.”
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