New name for water freight body

Over the last few months, Freight by Water has worked to redefine the organisation, focussing on its promotional and policy work on behalf of the UK’s water freight industry.In order to do so, Freight by Water has held three major membership events, published its comprehensive report,

UK Freight Trends Towards 2018 and Beyond

, obtained abundant coverage in both the national and trade media and worked with Government to encourage policy initiatives that provide support to water freight transport in the UK. These efforts have strengthened Freight by Water as a membership organisation which defines and redresses obstacles for water freight transport and promotes industry success stories.

The name change better reflects Freight by Water’s core objective, to facilitate the transport of freight by water in and around the UK. When Sea and Water was inaugurated five years ago, the water freight sector was highly fragmented and poorly understood by the transport industry. Raising awareness required a more esoteric approach backed up by careful research. Today, water freight is recognised as a real choice by the logistics industry, policymakers and consumers. Freight by Water’s role is now much clearer: to get on with solid promotion.

The rebranding will be an ongoing process, to be completed early this year with the launch of a new website, rebuilt from the ground up and a much improved water freight transport database. The organisation’s address and telephone number remain the same, whilst the existing domain and email addresses will automatically be rerouted to www.freightbywater.org.

Executive director Francis Power said, ‘ With this name change comes clarity of our role as the UK’s short sea, coastal and inland water freight promotion centre. We will focus our work to build on the successes of the last five years and ensure that difficult market conditions do not set back our goal of delivering a reduction in carbon, congestion and costs to the UK consumer.’