The fund aims to help SMEs roll out new technology and ways of working to unlock potentially huge efficiencies and emissions reductions across the sector.
This can include how to organise containers better so they can be more easily broken up for the final part of their journey or how to improve links between rail, maritime and road transport, an official release said.
The fund was announced last year within the government’s Future of Freight plan, the first-ever cross-modal and cross-government plan for the UK freight transport sector.
It targets the five priorities for the freight sector identified in the plan—being cost-efficient, reliable, resilient, environmentally sustainable and valued by society.
The fund will look to support ideas and technology addressing, in particular, three long-standing issues in the freight sector: a lack of large-scale cross-industry data collection and sharing between different modes of freight transport that could improve efficiencies and coordination; difficulties in inter-modal transport and ways to improve how large consignments are broken up into smaller ones, which could reduce emissions and traffic; and improvements in freight distribution in ports across different transport modes that could create knock-on benefits with timings, efficiencies, and predictability of the rest of the journey.
The Future of Freight plan sets a strategy for the government and industry to work closely together to deliver a world-class, seamless flow of freight across the UK’s roads, railways, seas, skies and canals.
The plan also explains how identifying a National Freight Network will help to better understand freight movements and their value to the economy.
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