Kwasi visited BA's Cargo Centre at Heathrow.
In an article for the Surrey Herald & News, Kwasi said:
I chatted with staff and looked around the cargo terminal, Ascentis, which is one of the most advanced automated freight processing facilities in the world. The size of six football pitches, it is designed to cope with over 800,000 tonnes of cargo every year! Inside, there are 9,000 storage cages, placed over five levels and serviced by automatic hoists and transfer vehicles. A bar-coding system instantly tracks a piece of freight at any point on its journey.
Air freight services are vital to the UK as an island nation, and make a crucial contribution to our economy.
While air freight accounts for only 0.5 per cent of the UK's international goods movements by weight, by value, 25 per cent of our international goods movements are made by air.
Indeed, the users of air freight services are usually those with high value goods that need to be moved in small quantities, perishable goods or medicines that would not be able to survive the time taken for a sea voyage. These include businesses in the technology, business service and pharmaceutical sectors. In these industries, air freight provides the flexibility and speed of delivery needed to respond to customers' needs in today's global free trade environment.
In these ways, cargo facilities like BA's allow the UK to function as an international centre of business and high value manufacturing. Ensuring that these services are readily available will be vital to supporting the growth sectors that are so important to the UK's future economic success, high-tech companies and financial and business services.
For these reasons, our ability to transport freight by air should be a focus in any discussion over aviation capacity that we have.