Britain’s rail freight sector runs on a strategy that is almost a decade old. The Department for Transport’s Rail freight transport strategy, published in 2016, remains the default reference point for the industry’s priorities and national policy framework. It has long been treated as the foundation for modal shift, capacity planning and the business case for investment – but RailFreight.com UK Editor Simon Walton argues it was drafted for a different era.
A lot has changed since then. The COVID-19 shock, the reshaping of global supply chains, the rise of containerisation, the growth of new inland terminals, deep-sea port expansion, and the decarbonisation agenda have all shifted freight from a support mechanism for Britain’s sunset industries and a specialist part of the railway’s operations into a national economic issue. A 2016 strategy cannot be expected to survive intact in 2025 and beyond. Yet survive it has.
The Budget didn’t help
The Department for Transport offered a partial refresh in 2023 when it set a new ambition: rail freight should grow by at least 75 per cent by 2050, measured in net tonne-kilometres. That was welcome. It was overdue. However, it wasn’t a strategy. It was a target – and as any freight operator knows, a target without a path is a diversion, not a destination. Even the government acknowledges that the growth target works only if the entire industry collaborates and embeds the goal into infrastructure, planning and operations.
This week’s Budget didn’t help. Rail barely received a mention – and rail freight even less. For a sector responsible for transporting goods worth billions, relieving road congestion, and reducing emissions, being relegated to a footnote tells its own story. The Treasury is still not speaking freight’s language.
Meanwhile, Network Rail continues to insist – correctly, in fairness – that it must put “passengers first”. The arithmetic supports the sentiment. There are more than 20,000 passenger trains a day, compared with only a little over 600 freight services, giving them an unassailable claim to priority on any given timetable. Also – passengers vote, containers don’t (just saying). That is the reality of Britain’s mixed traffic railway. But it also exposes the weakness of the current policy landscape. Freight remains a tolerated guest on a network still fundamentally engineered for the commuter, not the container.
Lobby is good, strategy is better
We are promised a new public body, Great British Railways (GBR). But the nationalisation programme underpinning GBR is overwhelmingly crafted around passenger recovery, rolling stock ownership, fare reform, service reliability and timetable control. Freight is in the script but not yet on the stage. When rail reform documents talk about “core customers”, freight is very often written in the margins.
While the 2023 target is embedded into infrastructure planning for the current control period, it does not amount to a full strategic masterplan. I concede a mixed metaphor, in that a rising tide lifts all boats – and improvements in the network are equally good for freight, but, right now, the national eye is on improvements that make life better for passenger operations, and if freight benefits, all well and good. Let’s not go down the rabbit hole of Ely Area Capacity Enhancements.
Question to be answered
Does the sector actually need help to grow into that apparently arbitrary 75 per cent target? The idea that rail freight will scale itself organically ignores several structural obstacles. Freight is still around ten per cent of national tonne-miles. It has a limited voice in the political arena because the numbers look small and the industry lobby – for all its expertise and effort – cannot compete with the gravitational pull of the passenger railway (or, whisper it, the road lobby). Representative bodies like the Rail Freight Group and the Railway Industry Association do a great job making the economic and environmental case to government, but the sector remains sub-scale, and its lobbying leverage is limited by that fact.
The government is not indifferent to freight – far from it. The growth target and ongoing reforms show freight is being factored into the future architecture of the railway. In reality, though, freight policy remains a supporting act. The private sector is doing exceptional work in driving innovation, winning new traffic and making the case for modal shift. The entry into the UK market of operators and investors such as shipping lines MSC (buying into Maritime) and CMA CGM (Freightliner intermodal) shows that international logistics players see opportunity and are willing to put capital behind it. That belief alone is a stronger endorsement of rail freight’s potential than any Whitehall document published to date.
Action points
So would a new national freight strategy help or hinder? Handled badly, yes – government interference can skew markets, slow decision-making, and turn investment cycles into political cycles. But done well, with industry in the lead, a national strategy could be transformative. It should not be a bureaucratic exercise.
It should be a clear, joined-up plan that looks beyond incremental improvements and confronts some real questions:
- Network capacity and freight-first corridors.
- Port and terminal connectivity.
- Strategic gauge and axle-load planning.
- Long-term rolling stock transitions.
- Planning reform and land use for new terminals.
- Electrification, decarbonisation and energy policy.
- Modal shift support and road freight interaction.
The private sector has shown what it can do. The market is showing confidence. The sector is innovating, investing and expanding. But that is not enough. The current target is not ambitious enough. A 75 per cent increase by 2050 sounds bold until you remember that freight still commands little more than a single-digit modal share. It is a growth plan, not a transformation plan.
Britain does need a new rail freight strategy. The 2016 version has served its purpose, but it is no longer fit for today’s logistics landscape. The 2023 target is a statement of intent, not an instruction manual. The Budget made clear that rail freight is still too easy to overlook.
If not now, when?
A new strategy must be industry-led, must have government backing, and must move at the speed of the market – not the pace of statute or civil service process. It needs to set far more ambitious goals, driven by operators, ports, terminal owners, customers and investors. It must be bold enough to put freight at the heart of the national rail network, not a peripheral guest.
The foundations are there. The market appetite is there. The need is obvious. It’s time for government and industry to write a new freight strategy – one that doesn’t accept 75 per cent by 2050 as the limit of our ambition, but as the starting point. Work should begin now.