Prepared ahead of MultiModal 2025
It’s hard to spot a logistics revolution when it hides in plain sight.
From a distance, Britain’s Strategic Rail Freight Interchanges (SRFIs) might look like little more than industrial sheds bookended by train tracks and access roads. But walk the ground at SEGRO’s East Midlands Gateway or Northampton SRFIs, and the reality comes sharply into focus. These are not distribution centres—they are multimodal ecosystems. And they are among the most important, yet underappreciated, assets in Britain’s infrastructure portfolio.
But here’s the problem: despite their potential to drive down carbon, unlock jobs, and ease the pressure on our roads, SRFIs remain stuck on the margins of national infrastructure thinking. Planning is sluggish. Policy support is patchy. And public understanding of their value is often reduced to local traffic concerns and speculative NIMBYism. All while our logistics sector buckles under the weight of rising freight demand, tight labour markets, and a net-zero clock that’s ticking louder every year.
How did we get here? And more importantly, how do we get back on track?
A System Under Strain
The last few years have made one thing clear: the UK’s supply chain is more fragile than we’d like to admit. Brexit brought complexity. COVID brought disruption. The war in Ukraine and Red Sea attacks brought volatility. Our just-in-time logistics model, long reliant on long-haul trucking, has never looked more exposed.
Currently, around 79% of domestic freight in the UK moves by road. That figure alone should set off alarms—not just for its environmental implications but for the sheer inefficiency it suggests. Congestion, driver shortages, and emissions targets all collide on Britain’s motorways. The Department for Transport has ambitious decarbonisation plans, but those ambitions remain aspirational at best without a serious modal shift to rail.
And yet, the tools for change are already in our hands.
The Missed Opportunity of Multimodal
SRFIs are the quiet workhorses of modern logistics. Properly integrated, they allow containers arriving at ports to be moved inland by rail, sorted and stored in rail-connected warehousing, and then distributed locally by HGV. It’s not just efficient – it’s transformative. As we explored in From Shedscapes to Social Infrastructure, logistics developments like SRFIs can—and should—act as anchors for active travel corridors, green infrastructure, and even long-awaited transport solutions like the Kegworth bypass. East Midlands Gateway is a strong example of what’s possible when design ambition, infrastructure planning, and local benefit align.
Each fully loaded freight train can remove up to 76 lorries from the road. The emissions savings are substantial. So is the potential to relieve pressure on key arteries like the M1 and M6.
But what truly makes SRFIs powerful is how they knit together into a wider economic geography. With the right policy alignment, they can form the backbone of a new national freight corridor, linking Freeports, manufacturing hubs, and city regions via cleaner, faster logistics. Europe is already moving in this direction. Germany’s KombiTerminals and the Netherlands’ Betuweroute have demonstrated the value of public-private investment in freight rail corridors. The UK, by contrast, still treats SRFIs as discrete planning cases—not as nodes in a national strategy.
And that’s part of the problem.
More Than Just Planning Delay
When BWB first supported the DCO process for the East Midlands Gateway over a decade ago, the potential was evident—but so was the resistance. Concerns ranged from traffic and air quality to land use and biodiversity. All valid. But without a national narrative to contextualise the scheme’s benefits, local opposition could—and often did—define the conversation.
The same pattern has played out at sites like SEGRO Logistics Park Northampton, and Radlett. Each required years of planning, consultation, technical defence, and detailed design to secure approval. That depth of process is essential, particularly for infrastructure of this scale. But the absence of a coordinated planning framework for SRFIs means every project is forced to make its case from scratch, often to multiple stakeholders with conflicting priorities.
And yet these projects get built. Quietly, persistently, and—crucially—collaboratively.
BWB’s experience across the vast majority of live SRFI projects in England has shown that progress is possible when developers, consultants, and local authorities share a vision. But without top-down support, that process is always slower and harder than it needs to be.
SRFIs Are Infrastructure—Let’s Treat Them That Way
It’s time we reframed SRFIs for what they are: critical national infrastructure.
The UK’s current approach lacks the ambition – and integration – required to fully realise their value. SRFIs shouldn’t just be adjacent to the national conversation on levelling up, net zero, and economic resilience. They should be central to it.
Recent legislative initiatives, notably the Planning and Infrastructure Bill 2024–25, signal a shift towards more streamlined infrastructure development processes. Proposed reforms to the NSIP regime, including mandatory five-year reviews of National Policy Statements and streamlined consultation requirements, aim to reduce delays and provide greater certainty for projects like SRFIs. Additionally, the Bill’s emphasis on cross-boundary strategic planning encourages the integration of SRFIs into broader regional development frameworks. While these changes hold promise for accelerating SRFI deployment, they must be balanced with robust environmental safeguards to ensure sustainable growth.
That means:
- Recognising SRFIs in the National Infrastructure Strategy as a key enabler of low-carbon growth.
- Creating freight corridors with protected status and accelerated planning support. – Aligning DfT, DLUHC and BEIS around a shared SRFI investment strategy.
- Embedding SRFIs into spatial planning as the default model for logistics development near major conurbations and transport arteries.
It also means improving how we talk about them.
Too often, SRFIs are pitched through the lens of development footprint rather than economic footprint. In reality, they’re job creators, emissions reducers, and resilience builders. Projects like iPort Doncaster, which BWB helped bring forward, don’t just move goods—they catalyse wider regeneration and attract inward investment. Our innovative low-maintenance concrete slab systems for container stacking, now in use at multiple sites, are a small but telling example of how UK engineering is solving tomorrow’s challenges today.
But these stories need airtime—and they need political backing.
Building Trust, Track by Track
Public trust is key. That’s why early, honest stakeholder engagement isn’t optional—it’s essential. While not an SRFI, our work at Peddimore, one of the UK’s most prominent logistics, distribution and manufacturing locations, showed that digital consultation, transparent data, and co-designed social value initiatives can shift the dial on community support. People don’t just want to be heard—they want to be part of shaping the future.
The next generation of SRFIs will not be imposed. They will be earned – through trust, through transparency, and through a shared sense of benefit.
The Way Forward
SRFIs are not a silver bullet—but they are a serious answer to some of the UK’s most pressing logistical, economic and environmental questions.
The challenge is no longer whether they work. It’s whether we’re ready to back them fully—not just site by site, but as an overall ecosystem for freight.
At BWB, we’ve seen what’s possible when ambition meets delivery. The question now is whether the UK is ready to stop treating SRFIs as a planning burden, and start treating them as what they truly are: the tracks on which a smarter, cleaner, and more resilient Britain can be built.