£7 million tech fund to decarbonise freight and boost innovation

Date: Wednesday 11 January 2023

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Delivering freight across the UK could become more efficient and cleaner thanks to a £7 million government-backed fund launched on 9 January 2023 that will roll out innovative new ideas and technology across the industry.

The freight innovation fund (FIF) will go to up to 36 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). They will then work with industry-leading companies to develop innovations to make freight more efficient, resilient and greener, such as ways to improve how freight moves between rail, road and maritime transport.

By giving innovators the opportunity to test their ideas, 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.

Roads Minister Richard Holden said:

Our freight industry is vital to underpinning the economy and keeps Britain moving, so it is crucial we invest in new innovations to make it greener and quicker.

This fund will accelerate new ideas and technologies, helping to develop a future pipeline of innovations that can be rolled out to create jobs and allow everyone to get their goods faster and easier.

The innovation 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 5 priorities for the freight sector identified in the plan, including being cost-efficient, reliable, resilient, environmentally sustainable, and valued by society.

Working to bolster the capacity of the freight network – for example, to anticipate, absorb, resist or avoid disruption and quickly recover from disruption when it does occur – can increase the resilience of supply chains across the country for a wide variety of industries.

The fund will look to support ideas and tech addressing, in particular, 3 long-standing issues in the freight sector.

• a lack of large-scale cross-industry data collection and sharing between different modes of freight transport, such as road, rail and maritime, that could improve efficiencies and coordination
  difficulties in inter-modal transport, such as between rail and road
• ways to improve how large consignments are broken up into smaller ones, which could reduce emissions
• traffic 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 government’s 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.

The FIF builds on previous government initiatives designed to support increased research and development in the freight industry; previous technologies supported in other funds include:

• Hypermile who developed an artificial intelligence programme that offers real-time feedback to help heavy goods vehicle drivers save fuel
• Fishbone Solutions developed a programme that uses vibrational data from rail freight wagons and Artificial Intelligence analysis to determine whether the wagons are working correctly
• CGA Simulation created a tool that simulates urban environments to predict the best place for infrastructure to enable radical development in logistics.

Delivered by Connected Places Catapult, the fund will give SMEs access to technical and business support from the organisation.

 

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