Road and rail connections with mainland Europe are well established, via the Channel Tunnel and ferry routes. Numerous ports serve destinations in Europe and worldwide. A network of air cargo routes provides truly global coverage.

The UK’s integrated transport network provides fast, low-cost delivery of raw materials and manufactured products throughout the European Economic Area. A comprehensive toll-free motorway and road network joins all major UK cities and industrial centres to air and seaports. The UK is one of the few countries in Europe not to restrict heavy goods vehicles from driving at weekends and public holidays.

Everywhere in the country is within 100 miles of a container port. Most of the UK’s ports are privatised and equipped to handle high-volume roll-on/roll-off (roro) container traffic. The UK’s harbours handle over 500 million tonnes of freight each year, with more than 300 sailings per day to mainland Europe.

The Channel Tunnel links the UK by road and rail to the rest of Europe. It provides additional capacity to roro ferries, resulting in increased competition in pricing and in journey times.

The UK’s global air network is centred on Heathrow Airport just outside London, but extends throughout the regions.

Heathrow offers direct flights to over 100 European destinations. It is also the second largest cargo airport in Europe, handling over 1.2 million tonnes of cargo in 1999.

At Heathrow, British Airways (BA) opened its new $350m World Cargo centre in May 1999. This vast terminal, with nearly three sq miles of space, has doubled BA’s cargo capacity at Heathrow to 800,000 tonnes per year. Its facilities include a perishables centre and a special handling centre for express, livestock and other cargoes.

It has an online system, which allows customers to generate waybills and barcodes via the Internet and track their consignments en route. It also runs an integrated trucking fleet for the delivery of perishable and just-in-time consignments.

Luton, Stansted and East Midlands airports all recorded sharp growth in international air freight volumes during 1999.

Manchester Airport in the North West handles more than 90,000 tonnes of international freight annually, and this will increase further when a second runway opens. Deregulation has allowed Manchester to purchase Humberside Airport in the North East, which it intends to develop as a regional hub.

The UK will soon become part of a pan-European electronic rail freight tracking system. This will further speed up the flow of information between the rail freight operators and their shippers. The system uses passive electronic tags fixed to the outside of containers which are interrogated at various points across the network and the data is fed back to a central control point.

The UK’s telecommunications industry was deregulated far earlier than in any other European country, and is well ahead in its liberalisation policy. Over the past 10 years, British Telecom (BT) has built up the most advanced telephone network in Europe and, with CONCERT, worldwide. Other major telecommunications companies such as Cable &Wireless and AT&T also offer national and international services from the UK.

Competition between more than 200 licensed providers means that British telecommunications prices are scheduled to go on falling in real terms. The UK is a magnet for international customer communication centres and home to almost 40% of all telebusiness agents in Europe.

The UK is home to one of the best third-party logistics industries in Europe, with over 20,000 companies providing road haulage, rail freight and warehousing services. The total turnover of the top 100 companies is around $32 billion, with the top 20 companies accounting for 75% of this figure.

Six of the top 20 European-based logistics service providers are in the UK. Contributing factors to this success are:
The UK transportation market was liberalised in 1968. The resulting competition led to large-scale rationalisation among the road haulage sector.

With 60 million consumers, the domestic UK market is large enough for companies to achieve a considerable turnover along with high quality standards.

Many of the large UK logistics service providers, like NFC, Tibbett &Britten, P&O, Ocean and Hays Distribution have been expanding their activities on to the European continent over the past ten years in order to operate on a more pan-European and global level. The European market is becoming increasingly attractive to US-based logistics providers.

On the way to the Heathrow Express

The UK has attracted a large number of major foreign manufacturing plants located across the UK, most of which have large pan-European distribution operations. Among significant retail distribution centres that have set up in the UK in recent years is Disney Store’s European distribution centre in Coventry. Disney is building a new centre in Leicestershire.

Firms like AST, AGCO, AVX, Bay Networks, Fruit of the Loom, Fujikura, Ingram Micro, National Semiconductor, Raychem, Seagate, Stafford Miller and Yuken are among many companies that have chosen the UK as the base for their logistics operations in Europe –taking advantage of the UK’s advanced third-party logistics industry. Other significant distribution investments include: Power Europe (Birds Eye Walls) , Amazon. com and AAH Pharmaceutical (Gehe UK distribution in Birmingham) .

The UK’s HM Customs and Excise have been at the forefront of developments in international trade in recent years, such as:

	Type E warehousing – virtual warehousing dependent on inventory control, rather than physical warehouses
	Simplified customs freight procedures, including bureau schemes for agents
	Binding Tariff Information (single European classification)
	Single European Authorisation (SEA) – clearing all goods in one European country for destinations in different EU member states.

The growth of e-commerce is expanding the need for distribution solutions. Companies operating in the UK have hand-held computers with bar-code technology, which enables clients to download from the Internet the exact location of their parcels/consignments within real-time. Inventories are now much more sophisticated, enabling manufacturers to keep limited stocks on site and use the whole distribution supply chain from door to door as part of a lean just-in-time process.

Companies setting up in the UK find a telecommunications infrastructure to satisfy their most stringent demands, backed up with a reliability and quality unmatched anywhere else in Europe.

British Airways World Cargo Centre at London's Heathrow Airport

Information courtesy invest.UK



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