Freight

Welcome to the Freight pages on the Worcestershire County Council Transport website.

Some abreviations that get used when referring to Freight are as follows:

• HGV - Heavy Goods Vehicle
• HCV - Heavy Commercial Vehicles
• LGV - Light Goods Vehicle
• VOSA - Vehicle & Operater Services Agency

Lorries moving freight interacts with our lives everyday, 90% of products in our homes like, funiture, carpets, cookers, televisons, clothes garden sheds etc have more than likely been delivered by a lorry during its manufacture and when its been put up for sale.

With more goods being ordered directly off the web more deliveries are now being made directly to our homes.
These deliveries have to be made more often than not in a Lorry or Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV).  The drivers who do these deliveries are employed to carryout this role and do not enjoy driving large HGVs down narrow lanes, access roads and residential roads but its there job and thats what there paid to do and the customer would be unhappy if the goods they have paid for did not arrive.

Owners of haulage companies and drivers are residents themselves and do understand the bad feelings towards HGVs.  They have to operate to very low margins and in recent years many small to medium hauliers have gone into recievership.  Foreign HGVs are able to operate on our roads without paying road tax and our UK fuel costs by fitting larger fuel tanks to their tractor unitsfilling up in Europe where fuel is cheaper and being register outside of the UK.  This has given them an unfair advange to British hauliers who pay all these costs but have to compete on price with foreign hauliers.

The government has reconised this and is instructing VOSA to stop and check more foreign HGVs who often are operating with unroad worthy and illegal vehicles.  In time when trials have been done there will be some sort of Lorry Road User Charge that will charge all users of UK roads equally and make competition equal between UK registered Hauliers and Foreign Hauliers.

Within the pages in the Freight section of this website useful information on HGVs will be provided if you would like to see something not currently shown on these pages and you feel this would be useful please contact Paul Cooper on the link below.

The Worcestershire County Council as part of the Governments Local Transport Plan have facilitated a County Freight Quality Partnership which has a Working Group meeting every 3 months focusing on local solutions for local issues in Worcestershire.  Anyone interested in becoming part of this group can contact Scheme ID Team