Courier Work And The Oil Industry

There probably isn't a great deal that the courier industry can do to affect the deliberations of OPEC or the great global markets that define, ultimately, the price of oil once it reaches our shores. We also probably have even less influence over the price of petrol and diesel at the pumps, given the vast amounts of tax and duty that the government puts onto it.

Will Your Vote Count?
Yes, in theory, we can influence the latter at the ballot box every four or five years, but no party stands, or has ever stood, on a platform of making huge cuts in fuel duties. Therefore, vote for who you like - but it is unlikely to make much, if any, difference to the price you're paying in the garages.

What Does it Mean?
For the courier and haulage industries, excluding those of us that are driven entirely by pedal power, the cost of fuel has been a serious and ongoing problem since the first fuel crisis of the early 1970s. There are two aspects to the headache this causes our industry:
Our costs are driven upwards, sometimes unpredictably, and we are forced to pass these on to our clients (with all the ill-feeling and barrages of criticism that attempts at price increases bring with them);
For reasons that are unclear to many in the courier business, in some quarters the problem is not perceived to be the ever-increasing cost of fuel due to tax but instead that, somehow, our industry is not green enough.

The link between these two subjects is, at best, tentative. The vast majority of the price of fuel for the average courier is attributable to government tax. The more successful a courier business is, then the more fuel it will typically need. The more fuel it consumes, the more taxation income the government will receive. Therefore, constantly lecturing the industry to be greener by burning less fuel appears to be incomprehensible.
Isn't that, in effect, the same as saying you should be less successful? Hardly a slogan or philosophical viewpoint that is likely to help the economy recover and confidence to grow!It is also rather unclear exactly what can be done on the subject.

Is There a Solution?

Electric and hybrid vehicles are in the process of development and some are now becoming widely available; however, the average courier has even less control over the speed of technological innovation in these areas than they do over the price of crude oil.
There is no doubt that muscle power is extremely green, however, even the best cyclists are unlikely to be able to contribute much to (e.g.) express parcel deliveries over very long distances and to destinations that are not close to a railway service.
Some cynics may be inclined to believe that the apparently endless lectures on the need to be greener are perhaps designed, in part, to deflect attention away from the mountain of cost that our industry (and the wider economy) has to live with in terms of government fuel taxes. What some people in our industry would prefer to see, is rather greater emphasis on understanding:
What the true negative impact is of high fuel duties on the economy (including, of course, the courier business);
Exactly what the government is doing to stimulate the faster arrival of cleaner technology to replace our existing dependence upon carbon fuels.

Of course, those same cynics might also say that if society were able to change to entirely green electric-powered vehicles overnight, the government would have a financial crisis as their tax revenues disappeared.

So, for the poor old courier, the arrival of new green technology is unlikely to lead to lower costs in the medium to long-term. We may very well find that there is a sudden painful increase in the cost of the electricity bills as someone, somewhere, decides that all that lost fuel tax revenue has to be replaced!