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SME tech fund for road freight decarbonisation

Government launches a new fund to help small to medium-sized businesses to develop greener and more efficient solutions for freight

– New funding to scale up and roll out innovative tech across the industry

– £7 million over 3 years to develop ways to make it easier to move freight from one mode of transport to another and improve journey times and predictability.

– New solutions could help clean our air, reduce traffic, create UK jobs and allow people to get their packages and goods more quickly

The Freight Innovation Fund (FIF) will go to up to 36 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

They collaborate with leading companies in the industry to develop innovations.

The innovation fund was announced last year within the government’s future of freight plan, a cross-modal and cross-government plan for the UK freight transport sector.

5 priorities for the freight sector :

– Being cost-efficient

– Reliable

– Resilient

– Environmentally sustainable

– 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.

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 and ways to improve how large consignments are broken up into smaller ones, which could reduce emissions and 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

SMES will benefit from a freight innovation fund accelerator, which will provide bespoke business support to innovators to help them access private investment, as well as a freight innovation cluster, a community of innovators within the freight industry that hosts regular networking events and activities.