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In modern Britain, the garden variety of shed is revered as an icon of national identity, celebrated in books, television and even art exhibitions.
The commercial variety, on the other hand, is rather ignored — at least when it comes to planning for our future needs. The shed — or industrial and logistics — market, to give it its proper billing, is the poor relation in a planning system that doesn’t deliver very much very well.
Despite the 1.6bn tonnes of goods hauled into and around Britain each year, and a 25 per cent increase of jobs in the sector since 2010, the country suffers what the UK’s National Infrastructure Commission has called “freight blindness”. Neither local nor national government seems able to see its needs.
Those are changing at pace, even as some version of normality returns after the pandemic online shopping boom. Both demand for space and vacancy rates in the first half of the year were back close to pre-Covid levels, according to estate agent Savills. But rents are still rising, albeit at slower rates. And the UK still doesn’t have enough logistics space, or have it in the right places.
The stock of transport and storage space, once concentrated around ports and airports, is now clustered in the Midland’s “golden triangle” — within a four-hour drive of 90 per cent of the British population. Despite having double France’s ecommerce sales per head, the UK has a similar amount of industrial space per capita, according to Green Street. Every country in Europe pales in comparison to the US on both measures.
Online retail, as well as the rethink of supply chains after Brexit and covid, requires more and different space. But the system is not producing the big sites needed for national and regional distribution centres: work by Newlands Developments found that nearly 60 per cent of the largest units since 2018 had been built on sites not originally allocated for employment use. Nor is there enough urban or “last-mile” space for rapid deliveries to cater to everyone’s reluctance to leave the house.
In part this is down to a planning system and policy debate preoccupied with housing. In part it is down to the continued (and increasingly unfair) resistance among local policymakers to having logistics on their patch. The sheer size of modern facilities and more automation means more managerial, office and highly-skilled roles in warehouses.
At a basic level, the industrial and logistics world has become more national and strategic in nature, while the planning system it relies upon remains parochial and sclerotic.
Local authorities ponder the world according to arbitrary administrative boundaries. As the British Property Federation said in response to a government call for evidence this month, the system fails to analyse economic needs robustly and then fails to think “larger than local” in how to deliver it. “Local Plans” setting out strategies and priorities for an area are meant to be the bedrock of the current system, but only a fifth of authorities are expected to have one in place by 2025, thanks to policy uncertainty from Westminster. The average plan takes a ridiculous seven years to adopt.
Lack of flexibility or agility to respond to market needs is compounded by a seeming unwillingness to co-operate across local boundaries. Multiple reports on strategic employment sites in the West Midlands have been ignored at local level since 2015, said the BPF. Recommendations from a regional study of warehousing needs in Leicestershire were largely not taken forward, with each local authority instead doing its own research based on different demand methodologies, different time periods and different definitions of the industrial market.
This is the same old story of the fallout from the government’s 2010 decision to abolish regional development agencies. A joined-up approach will become yet more important when the country attempts to decarbonise long-haul freight, an endeavour for which the UK lacks even the logistics data to start planning properly, argues Phil Greening at Heriot Watt University.
In the meantime, a fragmented and dysfunctional system is failing to deliver the logistics space that modern businesses and lifestyles demand.
