The retail property industry is urging retailers to provide financial backing for freight consolidation centres to reduce lorry movements within town centres.
The Bristol City Council-funded pioneering facility to take deliveries at an edge-of-centre location and then consolidate them into fewer loads has reduced participating retailers’ HGV movements by 75%, or 178,000km in total. But, after four years, it continues to require subsidy.
The BCSC (British Council for Shopping Centres) urged more shops to get on board for this, and proposed new schemes, pointing to evidence suggesting that participation would lead to increased sales.
Bath and North East Somerset Council, impressed by the results of the Excel DHL-operated facility for Bristol’s city centre, is proposing its own FCC close to Bath’s ring road and the M4, as part of a £60M package to tackle congestion in the city.
Bath’s city centre manager Andrew Cooper said such a depot would be ‘a possible solution in removing small-to-medium HGVs into the city centre at peak times’. He claimed that lines of lorries ‘block shop windows and the line of sight from Union Street to Milsom Street, deterring shoppers from venturing to the north side of the city’. The BCSC report Freight consolidation and remote storage also says that reducing vehicle movements is ‘a key benefit’.
However, the BCSC, while identifying benefits for individual retailers, highlighted that ‘the key challenge facing the Bristol scheme is to make the business model self-supporting’.
Seventy-two Bristol shops bring their deliveries to the FCC, fewer than one-quarter of the 300 based in the Broadmead area. The only other UK schemes identified by the BCSC research do not serve city centres, but out-of-town centre Meadowhall at Sheffield, or London’s Heathrow Airport.
Freight consolidation and remote storage says that while participating might cost a trader £30,000 a year, unit space currently used for storage space could be reallocated to shopping space, allowing a 5,000sqft shop to increase turnover by £300,000, and profit by £150,000.
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