Traditionally, road freight has dominated the UK transportation industry. However, according to industry experts, sea freight offers significant advantages over road transport. They believe that these advantages will gradually erode the industry's reliance on the roads forcing it to re-evaluate the benefits of moving goods by water

In the UK, around 2 billion tonnes of freight is transported annually. However, of this amount only 7% is transported by water whilst the majority is moved by road. Sea freight is frequently more efficient when it comes to transporting heavy cargo over longer distances. Therefore, with regards to tonne-kilometres, sea freight makes up around 26% of all cargo transported in the UK. In fact more than 130 million tonnes of cargo is moved by sea in the UK on an annual basis.

In recent years sea freight has been gaining favour in the UK transportation industry over road freight for a number of reasons.

First, the issue of road congestion has lead to questions about noise and preservation of the environment with regards to road freight. After all, road freight causes high levels of both noise and chemical pollution. Sea freight on the other hand is perceived to be relatively environmentally friendly and does not pose the same noise problems as road freight.

More importantly however, is the fact that sea freight in the UK is much safer than road freight. According to official statistics, although there have been a number of improvements in road safety levels over the last few decades, sea transportation still has much lower death rates from accidents than road transport. Indeed, in the UK, nearly all passenger transport deaths occur on roads rather than on water.

Given that sea freight is significantly more environmentally friendly than road freight, that issues of road congestion will become more not less relevant and that water transport is much safer than road transport, the sea freight industry in the UK is likely to become increasingly important over the next few years.