Will industry collaboration help deliver a logistics minister?

Richard Smith, RHA Managing Director sets out a multi-trade association vision to strengthen government support for our industry.

We talk a lot about collaboration at the RHA. Indeed, it’s one of the six defined values that our staff decided we should live by as a trade association, and we proudly hold ourselves to that standing commitment.

Taking the lead from your members and working with them on tackling their issues should be a given. But it’s sometimes a less obvious consideration between representative bodies even when there are commonalities. That’s why it’s so important that we and other transport and logistics associations are banding together on issues our respective members face. It’s serving our members well in our campaigns on abnormal loads and London’s Direct Vision Standard, giving us a stronger voice together.

And it’s in that spirit that we teamed up with ten other logistics trade associations to call on the next government to appoint a dedicated minister for logistics. The idea is that they would have cross-departmental responsibilities backed by a Cabinet Office structure – boosting that vital collaboration between government and industry.

From our perspective it would mean more targeted support to tackle our industry’s priorities on improving roads and infrastructure, planning rules, plugging skills gaps and on decarbonisation.

This is a point I made at the Microlise Transport Conference with Phil Roe from Logistics UK and CILT’s Bethany Windsor on our panel discussion about the industry’s future. We agreed that collaboration between trade associations has improved as we continue to evolve to better support our members. We’ve banded together to work even closer on our commonalities under the ‘Alliance of Logistics Trade Associations’ (ALTA) banner.

There’s no more critical time for our industry to have a dedicated logistics minister in government, with record numbers of hauliers going bust last year and no signs of that trend slowing amid unrelenting cost pressures.

It would boost confidence that government acknowledges the vital, ubiquitous role our industry plays enabling productivity and growth across all sectors. And ultimately, it’s recognition that collaboration benefits us all.