For Logistics UK chief executive Ben Fletcher, the Budget is not just about lorries and fuel tanks, but a want for ministers to see his industry as the thread running through every other sector: retail, manufacturing, construction, hospitality, all of which depend on goods moving efficiently around the country.
“You’re not just benefiting our industry, but you’re having a huge positive effect on the economy as a whole,” he says, and with the Budget looming, he is asking Chancellor John Healey to see it that way too.
So what does the logistics sector want to see from the Budget? Fletcher’s starting point is cost; following years of what he calls “pre-profit taxes”, the charges a business must pay simply to open its doors, have piled up at the same time as an energy shock driven by the conflict around the Strait of Hormuz.
“What we need is for government to find a way of reducing the cost of doing business,” he says, “both to support the industry that I represent… but also to bring down the costs to the consumer.”
That translates into three concrete asks. The first is the simplest: hold fuel duty, including the 5p cut, and continue the freeze on vehicle excise duty for large vehicles that the industry secured earlier this year. The second is a reform of business rates, which Fletcher argues would “really help encourage investment in warehousing, freight infrastructure” and the equipment that improves supply chain productivity.
Clean power
The third, is electricity. As hauliers edge towards electric HGVs, still a small slice of the fleet, though growing fast, with figures supplied afterwards by his team putting it at around 0.25 per cent of Britain’s 400,000-strong lorry fleet, more than double the share recorded in 2024, the price of power matters as much as the price of diesel once did.
Fletcher wants logistics brought into the British Industrial Competitiveness Scheme, the mechanism currently used to shield manufacturers from uncompetitive electricity prices. “It’s been a big success,” he says, “and we think that when you look at the wider benefit to the industry, bringing the logistics sector into” the scheme “would be a very smart move.”
The case, as he tells it, is less about lorries than about warehouses. Cold storage for food, warm storage for chemicals, and the round-the-clock lighting and climate control needed to keep supermarket distribution centres running seven days a week: all of this, he says, is “a really big deal” that gets far less attention than the price at the pump.
“Warehousing and the stuff that’s happening in the background” has grown sharply since Brexit, he adds, as firms build in buffer stock against the risk of delays at the border.
What happens if the Chancellor does none of this? Fletcher’s answer is blunt: prices carry on rising, just as the country heads into the months when demand for heating and lighting climbs. “It’s inevitable that you will get price rises,” he warns.
Bad news for hospitality, which he says struggles to absorb such costs, and for retailers, whose customers “notice that difference very, very quickly.” Businesses without spare cash, he adds, will also find it harder to invest in the technology that might cut costs for good.
Beyond the Budget
Beyond the Budget itself, Fletcher’s biggest ask concerns Brussels rather than the Treasury. He wants Healey to use his statement to reaffirm Britain’s commitment to a UK-EU deal on sanitary and phytosanitary checks, the border inspections that slow the movement of food in and out of Europe, a deal delayed by the change of prime minister and now expected to be revisited at a UK-EU summit in November. “It has been delayed,” he says, but a clear signal now “would be a huge step in the right direction.”
Logistics UK is not, Fletcher stresses, asking for tax giveaways. “We haven’t asked for big tax cuts. We haven’t asked for big national insurance reductions.”
What the logistics sector wants is narrower and, he believes, more deliverable: help with energy costs, certainty on fuel duty, and a nod towards Europe. But, whether the Chancellor obliges will become clear soon enough.
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