Examination of Witnesses (Questions 440-459)
MR TIM
INGLETON, COUNCILLOR
PAUL WATKINS
AND MR
DAVID SHEPPARD
27 FEBRUARY 2008
Q440 Mr Hollobone: With regard to
emissions, London has just introduced its Low Emission Zone. I
know it is early days, but is there any evidence that it has resulted
in significant reductions to levels of pollution from lorries
in London?
Mr Sheppard: I would not know.
I have not seen any statistics yet, but when you actually look
at the population of vehicles I think it is only about between
5 and 10% of the vehicles that do not actually conform. My own
personal view is that it is a lot of work for very little saving,
to be honest.
Q441 Mr Hollobone: Has it had any
effect on the John Lewis Partnership?
Mr Sheppard: No, none whatsoever.
Q442 Mr Hollobone: Could similar
schemes be implemented in other areas of the country, and has
Dover considered introducing a Low Emission Zone?
Mr Sheppard: I don't know about
Dover, but in the end it comes back to what are you achieving
by it. If you are going to say you want to have at least Euro
3 emission levels, then that actually means any vehicle which
was built after 2002 and there are very few operators that will
operate vehicles earlier than that unless they are specialist
vehicles. People like removal companies, they are suffering because
of the LEZ. It costs them £200 a day to come and do a furniture
removal and you could actually argue that most of the time the
vehicle is stood outside the customer's house being loaded and
unloaded, and it is very unfair.
Councillor Watkins: From our point
of view, we have taken this matter to both the Regional Assembly
and the Regional Development Agency, their European committees,
and both shipping emissions and freight emissions which concentrate
around the ports are common, obviously, for all ports and there
is a grouping called Cross-Channel Trans-Manche A, which is a
grouping of French and English ports who have got together to
look at some of these major issues, and a paper on emissions was
dealt with last Friday at this grouping and they have been charged
with coming up with some common policy solutions to actually try
and address this problem, to take it through the European Community,
the EU, but also in terms of shipping emissions to try and go
to the IMO to get further legislation so that we can get some
consistency.
Q443 Mr Martlew: Following on to
consolidation centres, obviously John Lewis owns Waitrose and
I noticed that there is a lot of internet shopping going around
in all these little vans which are flying about. How do you see
that is going to develop in the future? How will that impact on
freight?
Mr Sheppard: I think that providing
it is done sensibly it can actually reduce emissions, but it has
got to be done sensibly.
Q444 Mr Martlew: What is sensibly?
Mr Sheppard: Sensibly means that
the customers do not go out of their house and they do it over
the net and it is then delivered to them, but what in essence
you find is that they tend to still go to the store, select certain
things, and then perhaps go home and then get a delivery done
as well.
Q445 Mr Martlew: So they drive to
the store, decide what they want and give it to somebody else
to deliver?
Mr Sheppard: Yes.
Q446 Chairman: Not all of us are
as bad as that, Mr Sheppard! Some of us do not have the time.
Mr Sheppard: No, but it is one
of those things and there have been many studies actually done
on whether it does actually save emissions, but by and large if
you do some rough calculations the amount of deliveries you can
do on one van compared with the amount of fuel you would use in
X number of cars to do the same journeys, then it does make sense,
providing that car journey is not being undertaken as well.
Q447 Chairman: My friend, Mr Ocado,
comes and visits me every weekend with a different driver and
they manage to offer what they call "green slots", where
obviously there are a lot of people in the same place. They do
make a conscious effort to try and get some kind of structure
into it, do they not? Is that something which could be further
developed?
Mr Sheppard: I think so. When
you talk about "green slots" it really means that you
are going to dovetail -
Q448 Chairman: It really means some
other mug is spending his money in the same place!
Mr Sheppard: Exactly, yes, and
then you get a green slot if your neighbour has actually bought
something, so it is part of the scheduling tool, but yes, it is
good for the environment. It is when you start coming to timed
deliveries where you go to one customer in a location, go to another
location but then go back to the original location an hour later,
that is when the problems come in and that is why it needs to
be coordinated and there needs to be some sort of curtail on the
expectation of the customer and the service levels they want.
Chairman: I would like to see you sell
that one!
Q449 Mr Martlew: In a way what we
have been talking about is a consolidation centre, is it not?
The supermarket is that.
Mr Sheppard: Yes.
Q450 Mr Martlew: What about a more
general footprint? Why is the industry not building more of these
freight consolidation centres? Apparently they are a great success.
Mr Sheppard: They are a great
success. The John Lewis Partnership and most retailers have had
consolidation centres since the sixties. We consolidate everything.
If you take a look at a Waitrose store there will only be, in
essence, about five deliveries go in a day from our RDC, where
everything is consolidated, where at one time there would have
probably been 100 vehicles going in there in a day.
Q451 Mr Martlew: So you are probably
the wrong industry to ask, but if you are talking about construction
and things like that it does not happen very often, does it?
Mr Sheppard: No.
Q452 Chairman: Why is it then that
John Lewis, Waitrose, have now, in the City of London anyway,
started developing a parallel service to Ocado (with whom they
are associated) doing exactly the same thing at different times?
So we have Ocado and Waitrose both offering to deliver groceries.
That is not terribly intelligent planning, is it?
Mr Sheppard: Ocado is a separate
company to Waitrose. Ocado just sells Waitrose products.
Q453 Chairman: Oh, I see! So it is
friendly rivalry?
Mr Sheppard: It is friendly rivalry
and it helps to keep prices low.
Chairman: So long as we have established
that.
Q454 Mr Martlew: I presume they are
partners, though, in your organisation, the people who are employed
there?
Mr Sheppard: No, they are not.
Q455 Mr Martlew: They are not partners?
Mr Sheppard: No, they are not
partners.
Q456 Mr Martlew: Can we come back
to the general benefit of consolidation depots?
Mr Sheppard: Consolidation depots
are absolutely brilliant. It is how you actually get them to work
with smaller companies, you have obviously heard of the Bristol
one, which works very well but it is on a small scale. We have
looked at certain issues and people have approached me from one
of the Freight Quality Partnerships and asked could we actually
supply all the shops in a certain road, like the restaurants and
things, with our food. In that way we could take the stuff into
our shop and then deliver to all of the shops in a particular
street. The answer is, yes, it is possible. It is whether those
restaurants would want to buy exclusively from us. But when you
come back to the consolidation centre, if you can actually get
all shops to have all their goods delivered to one and then deliver
it into one shopping centre on a fewer vehicles, then you are
winning, but it is actually getting the consensus of the individual
shops.
Q457 Chairman: You would not be allowed
to do that under the Competition Act, though, would you, because
it would give you a very nice monopoly of particular roads and
shopping areas?
Mr Sheppard: Absolutely. It is
fraught with problems, but if you do it on an open basis, the
same as the Broadmead Shopping Centre, where the shops are allowed
to join this scheme but all their produce goes to an outside warehouse
and it is then linked in from there. That works extremely well,
but it is a very small population of the shops in the Broadmead
Centre that actually use it.
Q458 Mr Martlew: Are you aware of
whether the Government is encouraging this in any practical way?
Mr Sheppard: There is an initiative
for people to look at it and it is certainly part of the Freight
Quality Partnership's initiative. I think there are about four
in London which are actually actively looking at this, and it
is bringing it all together. I think in the end it will have to
come if we are actually going to reduce CO2 emissions and vehicle
movements within London.
Mr Martlew: Thank you.
Q459 Mr Leech: What could be the
effect of requiring local authorities to set the Freight Quality
Partnership's part of the local transport plan?
Mr Sheppard: I think it would
provide a big kick-start to the Freight Quality Partnerships.
It is noticeable in the paper that they are not even mentioned
and I think it is so important. It is the start of a journey of
getting everybody working together.
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