Resilience plan ignores supply chain, industry warns

Jonathan Walker of Logistics UK described this as an "enormous gap in infrastructure planning".

Walker said the government has traditionally treated freight as a standard industrial sector, similar to manufacturing, rather than recognising it as critical national infrastructure (CNI). He noted that policymakers still equate infrastructure with what is physically visible -- "pipes, wires, road and rail" -- yet overlook the far larger, largely unseen network of 20,000 freight operators working from depots across the UK.

He argued that this mindset shows the government has not absorbed the "starkest lesson from Covid": how quickly supply chains can be disrupted. The new strategy, he said, fails to consider how CNI sectors would rely on their supply chains during an emergency, such as needing rapid access to spare parts when substations fail.

Walker described the document as a "missed opportunity ... but there is appetite for it to be revisited and reconsidered".

He stressed that when the new national resilience body is established, the logistics industry must "be in the room and part of the discussion".

This is particularly important as the future resilience of eHGVs and the electricity grid becomes increasingly interdependent.

Walker said there must be a far deeper understanding of critical supply chains, key freight routes and the availability of HGV-capable chargers at depots or shared sites.

He also highlighted the need for logistics to be embedded in the wider national resilience agenda, including cybersecurity -- both to protect fleets and to ensure the sector does not become a "back door" into other critical industries.