Three of the top five stories in this week's Motor Transport Executive Brief are hauliers in administration.
As Logistics Lead at @ and Editor at large of Destination Net Zero magazine I must address this with our new Prime Minister. The PM loves a bus the way other men love a mid-life Porsche. But if he wants to fix the cost of living, he perhaps needs to fall in love with something rather less photogenic: the 44-tonne artic.
Let me say at once buses are lovely. My career in transport started represented the best of bus operators in 1993. In his first week in the top job, Burnham is doing what he has always done: talking about the cost of living, and talking about buses, often in the same breath.
The Prime Minister loves a bus the way other men love a mid-life Porsche. And buses are lovely — my career in transport began representing the best of the bus operators
But here is the thing you cannot deliver the nation's groceries on a PCV.
Nobody has ever restocked a supermarket with a Leyland Atlantean. No hospital has taken delivery of its pharmaceuticals by bendy bus. The bricks, the food on the shelves, the fuel on the forecourts, the tat we order at midnight and regret by breakfast — every last item arrives by HGV, driven by somebody who got up at four, for a business running on a 2% margin.
This week those margins caught fire again. Oil is back at $100. The Iran ceasefire is over. The long way round the Cape adds nine days of fuel to every container — and lands, eventually, on the price of a tin of beans in Wigan.
When diesel rises, the haulier absorbs it, because the escalator clause got laughed out of the negotiation and he is terrified the customer will simply go to the next desperate operator down the road. She absorbs it until she can't. Then eighty jobs are in jeopardy — and nobody holds a press conference, because there is no jaunty bee and no fare cap to announce.
That is the cost-of-living crisis. The truck.
Bus fares are a cost some households pay some of the time. Haulage is a cost every household pays all of the time, baked invisibly into the price of everything. Cap the fare and you help the people on the bus. Let freight costs rip and you punish them the moment they get off it and go shopping.
Parity would look like fuel-duty certainty measured in years rather than fiscal events. And freight decarbonisation taken as seriously as the bus fleet's — because we subsidise zero-emission buses while the operator eyeing an electric tractor unit is asked to find three times the cost of a diesel, plus a grid connection quoted in geological time, out of that 2%.
I too am an Evertonian, brought up in Makerfield and understand brand. Andy Burnham's entire brand is the dignity of ordinary work and the overlooked North. Nobody keeps the show on the road more literally than the British haulier. Help hauliers it's the best cost-of-living policy you'll ever announce.
