4 FBJ FREIGHT BUSINESS JOURNAL contacts 2010


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EdITORIAL


cHRIS LEWIS - editor tel: +44 (0)208 645 0666 Mobile: +44 (0)7778 106433 chris.lewis@fbj-online.com


GILES LARGE tel: +44 (0)1728 685 558


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Chris Lewis


OpINION FROM THE EDITOR


Somehow, it always falls to the same few individuals to do most of the work that benefits a much wider community. It’s a sentiment I can sympathise with, having spent long hours at resident’s association meetings and even more typing up minutes and reports. It’s also true of the freight industry.


At the recent BIFA awards, outgoing chairman Andy Melton made a plea for more people to get themselves involved in the organisation. “We need young forwarders to step up and take the places of the people who are running BIFA.” Mr Melton, who hands over to Steve


Parker this year, pointed out that taking an active part in your trade association’s affairs is not a one-way street. “We get a great deal out of it. We are a small company, but this keeps us at the forefront of developments in the industry.” So don’t be shy – and I think we can take it that when Mr Melton


says ‘young’, you don’t necessarily have to be THAT young. As Andy Melton said in his speech, freight forwarding is often


described as a ‘hidden’ history, though that was hard to credit with the massed ranks of freight forwarder management assembled in London. Bear in mind this was only a small sliver of the number of people who working in the industry, the vast majority no doubt being back home minding the shop and doing the myriad tasks needed to keep the UK economy ticking over. The freight industry can pat itself on the back for doing a job that


often seems thankless and, for all the talk of single markets and the integrated global economy, never seems to get any easier. Red tape and bureaucracy will always be with us, and it is the job of the forwarder to make sense and untangle it.


And now for the good news...Actually, considering that the UK


economy is emerging from one of the deepest recessions in living memory (or possibly not, given the latest GDP figures), there is a surprisingly large amount of it around. The first fruits of a major investment in windfarm-related developments has been made, with Siemens’ selection of the port of Hull as a major manufacturing base. The rest of the industry is watching this development closely, anticipating that there will be many more such investments to come. Work is well in hand to enlarge the port of Southampton to


handle larger vessels and new super-post-panamax cranes should be delivered soon. And there are even signs of a revival in the fortunes of the long-


distance international rail freight segment in the UK, with the launch of the service by Eurotunnel’s new through-rail subsidiary. There has also been a wave of merger activity and new partnership


deals, which should help put freight businesses on a sounder footing once the recovery gets properly underway.


But as always with rail, it is a case of two steps forward, one step


back – or possibly even two steps back. As we go to press, we learn that the Government has decided to axe Freight Facilities Grants in England, which in their 37-year existence have been the catalyst for many intermodal operations, both on the rails and the waterways. The Scottish Government had already announced a similar move,


though the Freight Transport Association, Rail Freight Group and others are putting on pressure behind the scenes for a rethink, so everyone is keeping their fingers crossed. While the news that the grants were being cut isn’t entirely surprising, that doesn’t make it any more welcome either, and it goes against all its protestations of greenness and complying with EU carbon targets. This is one area of spending that the Government must look at reinstating at the


ISSUE 1 2011


FBJ has already become established as the only UK and one of the few pan-European Multimodal newspapers. The comments we have received prove there is still room for a hard copy publication with the freighting industry. You don’t have to look at a screen all day!


FBJ boasts the most informative and authoritative source of information with unrivalled in-depth knowledge of the rapidly changing freight business environment.


As the definitive publication within the sea, air, road and rail freight sectors, each issue includes regular news and analysis, in-depth coverage discovering the business decisions behind the news stories, shipper and exporter reports, opinion, geographical features, political and environmental issues.


If you have any stories or letters which should be of interest or any feedback on FBJ, please contact our editor Chris Lewis - +44 (0)208 6450666 chris.lewis@fbj-online.com


NEXT ISSUE


Our next issue will include features on Ireland and the Far East plus a preview of the Multimodal show. There will also be our regular IT Section and news pages. For further details contact John Saunders - +44 (0) 151 427 6800 john.saunders@fbj-online.com


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earliest opportunity when economic growth finally returns. Let’s hope that the hiatus lasts only a year or so.


The European Commission is minded to try and make most freight


moving more than 300km (186 miles) from EU seaports go by train or barge in about 40 years’ time, according to the Transport Commissioner, Siim Kallas. Well meant, perhaps, and it would make a big contribution to a planned 50-70% cut in the transport sector’s CO2 emissions, but it’s quite a tall order given current waterway and rail infrastructure. A cynic might say that the suggested timescales – 2050 for the


main plan, with an intermediate target date of 2030 – are such that most of us will be retired, if not worse, by the time any of this is supposed to come to fruition. It’s very unlikely that many people will be around to call the commissioner to account. Perhaps, it might be more constructive to have smaller, shorter-term objectives that could easily be achieved in, say, five years’ time. It would be particularly hard to achieve much of a modal shift on


the UK’s current rail system or waterway system though of course relatively little port-related traffic moves that far in the UK anyway. If and when the high speed rail line from London to the Midlands and North is completed, that would free up capacity on the existing route for freight, but it has got to happen first and I doubt if anyone is expecting even the first section to be operating in much less than a couple of decades. As we highlight in our Netherlands report in this issue, a similar


request by the Dutch Government for an increase in the waterways’ share coupled with a major increase to the port of Rotterdam’s container handling capability would lead to a four- or five-fold in box traffic on the canals. That’s an awful lot of boxes. The commissioner was at least honest enough to say that such a


profound modal shift would be difficult to achieve and has promised various measures such as ‘one stop’ freight shops to help ease the process, but ultimately such a profound modal shift is going to require the pouring of concrete – lots of concrete.


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