How to Really Get Britain Moving

Foreword

I am one of the people this report is about

I have moved house more times than I can easily count. I have used storage facilities and waited on other people's logistics. I have worked for the largest firms in this industry and for the smallest family ones. I have been a porter and I have worked in a warehouse. And I have spent sixteen years on the other side of the economy entirely, in regulated markets, working closely with public bodies on compliance, governance and, most of all, digital transformation.

How does someone end up with that resume?

I left school early, in a part of South London where the next step was neither obvious nor always kind. Removals gave me my start. Not just a job, but the three years that made me: people skills, hard work, problem solving, running a task from one end to the other, learning to move fast and think on my feet, paying my own tax for the first time. That start, and a man called Robin Brown who took a chance on me, is what eventually opened the door to those sixteen years in enterprise technology. None of the rest of my life happens without the vans.

I came back to this industry last year, and I did not expect the feeling that came with it. Walking into the yard at Stranks on the first morning, sitting in the cab with Dan and Jamie, meeting people again, watching the professional end of this trade do the thing it does best: make the hardest day of someone's life look easy. The graft, the long waits for keys, the teams coming together at the end of a job to finish each other's work without being asked. I am not as strong as I was at eighteen. But I love it, and I love this industry, and I am not ashamed to say so.

That is where this document comes from. It is not marketing. We have spent the best part of a year in development, working closely with people who have served in the BAR, FIDI and the wider international industry, and I have spent that year in long conversations with real operators: people running their businesses every single day, large operators buying firms and reshaping the top of this market, many of them outside the BAR entirely. This is written from inside the trade, with respect for the people in it, and with the conviction that it deserves a better account of itself than it has been giving.

Why is this coming from an industry software vendor?

It's a fair question, and worth answering plainly. Does having experience, and having seen these problems before, give me the right to comment on this industry? On its own, no. Not at all. But that isn't where this comes from. I speak to operators every day, and the issues in these pages are not mine. My customers raised them independently, in ordinary conversation, long before I wrote a word. None of this is novel, and none of it started with me. I am simply sitting in an unusual seat, one of the few places you can hear what operators actually say and see what the operational data actually shows, at the same time. That is the only thing I am claiming: not the right to judge this industry, just a clear view of it from a seat most people never get to sit in.

What follows is my attempt at that account.

Earlier this year, the British Association of Removers and a Shadow Minister put their names to a report called Getting Britain Moving. I read it. Properly, four or five times, because I run a business in this industry and I care about where it goes, and because a document with that title, carrying those signatures, deserves a serious reading rather than a glance.

So let me be straight from the first line: I am with its ambition. The sector is overlooked. It does deserve a hearing. And the people who wrote it want, broadly, the same things I want. This is not a rebuttal. It is the other half of a conversation the report started and then, I think, left unfinished.

Because here is the problem. We are asking a government that has almost no attention to spare to spare some. A government managing wars abroad and a child-protection reckoning at home, rising taxes, a Prime Minister on the way out, a cost of living crisis, an immigration system under strain. By common consent, a country having a hard time of it. To ask that government to turn, even briefly, toward removals and storage is to ask a great deal. And an ask that large carries an obligation that the report does not meet: to explain, unanswerably, why this is worth their time.

The report does not do that. It hands an overwhelmed government a list of requests and assumes the importance rather than earning the attention. A list of asks, handed to people who are drowning, is not a strategy. It is a document destined to be filed under "later," and later never comes.

So this is my attempt at the missing half. First the why. And then, unlike the report, the what: a short, plain set of asks, sorted by who actually has to act, beginning with ourselves.

01 · The diagnosis

We are not who they think we are

The trouble starts in the foreword, and it is a trouble of category. The report finds it "striking" that the challenges facing removals mirror those of the wider housing system. But a mirror is a passive thing. It reflects; it does not act. And the moment you accept the framing that removals is a reflection of the housing market, you have already lost the argument, because you have filed the industry under "things that happen to housing" rather than "things that make housing happen."

We are the haulage of human mobility.

We are not a mirror of the housing market. We are a logistics industry that the housing market depends on to function. The right comparison is not to estate agency or conveyancing. It is to haulage. We are the haulage of human mobility. And once you make that switch, the relationship stops being a coincidence of shared symptoms and becomes what it actually is: causal. Haulage moves the economy's goods. We move its people. You do not fix mobility by polishing the mirror. You fix it by resourcing the lever.

The same misunderstanding produces a sentence I would gently invite anyone in this trade to read twice. The report suggests moving is expensive because removers are "taking your most valuable possessions" across the country, and therefore we need our best people doing it. With respect, that is not why it is expensive. The value of what is in the van is almost irrelevant to the price. The same crew, the same vehicle, the same day move a cheap sofa or a priceless one. A move is priced by its inputs: labour, fuel, vehicles, insurance, time. It is a logistics operation, costed like one. That a basic point of logistics economics is misread in the foreword of the industry's flagship report is not a small thing. It is the clearest possible sign of how badly the sector is understood from the outside, and it should worry us, because everything downstream of a misdiagnosis inherits the error.

There is a third version of the same mistake, and it appears later, when the report reaches for the comfortable story that the sector is a nation of plucky small businesses bearing the brunt of regulation, cost and unpredictability. It is a politically attractive picture and it is wrong, and it is wrong in a revealing direction. Regulation in this industry does not fall hardest on the small operator. It falls on the firms that choose to be accredited, the professional end that submits, voluntarily, to inspection and standards and insurance obligations. The small informal operator carries almost none of that. Rising costs are universal and scalable; they do not single out the small. And market unpredictability, by the available data, has fallen hardest on the largest firms, not the nimblest. The plucky-SME framing is comforting and it conceals the real distortion in this market, which is not regulation crushing the little guy. It is a two-tier industry in which the regulated carry the weight and the unregulated shed it and compete on the difference. You cannot fix a market whose central problem you have described upside down.

A sector that talks like a passenger

Read the report's tone closely and a posture emerges. The industry is overlooked, it is vital, it should be recognised, it deserves attention. Acted upon, every time. Helped, never helping. A backbone, a beneficiary, a thing that moves your possessions from one place to another and waits to be noticed.

That is the posture I want to argue against, because it is beneath us and because it is not true. We are not a carrier bag in the wind, waiting for someone to pick us up. We are the engine of national mobility. And a document that wants to get Britain moving has to be written by people who understand they are driving, not being driven.

02 · The mechanism

The thing the report never says

You can see the passivity most clearly where the report is supposed to be strongest: in the case for the sector's economic value. It asserts that value at length and never once builds the mechanism. It tells you the industry matters. It never tells you how it matters. And the how is the entire point, because the how is the thing a busy government needs in order to care.

Take the claim that "ease of moving encourages people to take opportunities further afield." It sounds right and it is backwards. Nobody decides that moving is easy and goes looking for a job in another city. They find the opportunity first. What moving does, when it is done well, is remove the friction that decides whether they can act on it. We are not a reason people move. We are the difference between a move that happens and a move that is abandoned. That distinction is not pedantry. It is the whole mechanism the report skips.

Mark Taylor writes that the industry does not simply respond to housing market activity but helps make it possible. He is right, and that sentence deserves a whole argument behind it. What follows is an attempt to build on what he means: to show the mechanism by which this sector does not merely service mobility but determines it.

Here is the mechanism, stated plainly, because it is the most important thing in this piece and it is the thing the report gestures at and never builds.

In almost every industry, a bad supplier loses one customer. In ours, a bad supplier does something far more damaging: it deters the next move. Moving is already the thing people dread and defer. A bad experience of it, the no-show, the damage, the surprise bill, the day that went nothing like the one they were promised, is the single most powerful reason a person puts off ever doing it again. So the quality of supply in this industry does not just win or lose a job. It governs future demand. A bad move removes a transaction from the entire chain: the next one that person now delays for years, the recommendation they never make, the "never again" that spreads through everyone they know.

In ours, a bad supplier does something far more damaging: it deters the next move.

Which means the sector is not downstream of mobility. It is a determinant of it. Raise the floor and you do not merely service the housing market. You generate activity within it, because you send people away from a move willing to do it again.

And this is where the human truth and the economic truth turn out to be the same truth. Moving will always be a big day. It becomes the most stressful day of the year only when it is handled by people who cannot orchestrate it. Most people move three or four times in their whole lives. A removals company does it every single day, and has seen every variable a move can throw at it. A professional does not just carry the boxes. They manage the whole thing: they guide you, they plan it, they handle the logistics, and above all they set honest expectations, so the day arrives looking like the one you were promised. The operator who positions themselves to guide you through it is the professional. The one who turns up and asks which box goes where is not. A professional's real skill is not lifting heavier boxes. It is making sure there are no surprises. And the gap between what people are promised and what they get is exactly where the trauma lives, and the trauma is exactly where the lost future transactions come from. Feeling and economics, the same mechanism, viewed from two ends.

03 · The market

Two products sold as one

Which brings me to the part of the market everyone in it understands and the report cannot quite bring itself to say.

We sell two completely different things as though they were one thing at two prices. A professional move and a man with a van are not the same service offered cheaply and expensively. They are different products, with completely different cost bases. The professional carries storage, owns vehicles, employs staff on the books. The man with a van carries almost none of that, which is exactly why he is cheaper, and exactly why he cannot do what the professional does. Same direction, categorically different journey.

This is not a strange or unique problem, and it is not a problem for government to solve. Every industry has two tiers and the better tier thrives, because the difference is made visible. We eat three times a day, and the market sustains everything from fast food to fine dining, because people can see what they are choosing. A black cab and a minicab make the same journey; the premium survives because the difference is legible. Branded and unbranded clothes hang on the same rail looking similar; the buyer knows they are not the same. None of this is new. On the face of it the two things look alike. They are not alike, and in every healthy market the customer can tell.

They are not alike, and in every healthy market the customer can tell.

So the problem in removals is not that a cheap tier exists. It is that the difference between the tiers is invisible at the point of sale. That is a perception and a sales problem, not a policy problem. It is not something for mum and dad in Westminster to come and fix for us. We are big boys and girls. We fix it by making the difference visible.

The report blames the rise of the informal economy partly on social media, on cheap promotion reaching customers directly. But social media is not a weapon the cowboys hold and the professionals lack. It is a channel everyone has. Some of the most sophisticated and best-marketed operators in this industry, people who own substantial removal firms and have built the largest followings in the trade, are the same people now saying work is slow, that they are taking jobs on a Sunday and climbing into the van themselves because that is the only way to fill the week. If social media were the cause of the sector's troubles, they would be the winners. They are not. The medium is not the problem. The problem is that the customer cannot tell the difference between them and the man with the van, and no amount of marketing sells a difference the buyer cannot see. You do not lose to the bottom of the market because they have an app. You lose because the thing that makes you better is invisible at the point of sale.

The report does name the informal economy, twice, but it diagnoses the threat wrongly in another way too. The danger is not really the lone uninsured man with a van. It is the franchise: the branded operators who have put more people on the road under one trusted-looking name than any trade association has members, and who lend the appearance of professionalism to the bottom of the market. That is the competitive threat, and here is the uncomfortable truth the report avoids: the government cannot touch it. You cannot ask Westminster to legislate against a franchise. You compete with it, by being so visibly the better product that the customer can see the difference for themselves.

04 · The solution

The difference between being good enough and belonging to a club

So how do you make it visible? Not with a membership badge. With a mark of competence.

There is a distinction here that the whole industry has been blurring, and it matters more than almost anything else in this piece. There is a difference between a mark that says "I am good enough to do this" and a badge that says "I belong to this club." The first is about verified competence: I have been checked, I meet the standard, I can be trusted in your home. The second is about affiliation: I have joined something. To the firm, those can feel similar. To the customer staring at two quotes, they are worlds apart, because only one of them answers the question the customer is actually asking, which is not who are you a member of but can I trust you.

The industry has spent a long time offering customers belonging where what the customer needed was proof. That is why professionalisation, for all the effort behind it, has not moved consumer trust the way it should have. Membership was never the thing the customer was looking for.

Construction has already solved this. TrustMark is a government-endorsed scheme that tells a homeowner the tradesperson at their door has been checked, meets a standard, and runs a registered business. It is recognised by government but it is not invented by government, and that balance is exactly right. Removals needs its own version, and the design principles matter.

That is the difference made visible. That is how the customer finally tells the car from the bus.

05 · The omission

The room is already there. We are just not in it.

If there is one omission in this report that should stop the reader cold, it is this one, and it is buried in a single sentence two-thirds of the way through: that the sector is "rarely highlighted within economic policy frameworks."

It is rarely highlighted because nobody highlights it. The Shadow Minister's foreword does not raise it. The trade body's section does not ask for it. And here is the part that turns an omission into an indictment: the room already exists.

There is an active All-Party Parliamentary Group for Freight and Logistics. It was re-established after the 2024 election. It is chaired by a sitting Member of Parliament. It has been addressed by the roads minister. It is exactly, precisely, where this industry belongs, because removals is freight and logistics. The haulage sector did the work to rebuild that voice after the election and to populate it. And this report, co-authored by the sector's principal trade body, does not mention it, does not engage it, does not ask to join it.

The door is open. We are simply not walking through it.

That is not a misfortune that has befallen the industry. It is a choice the industry is making, and it is the purest possible illustration of the passivity running through the whole document. An industry serious about being heard does not write a report lamenting that it is unheard. It walks into the room that is already waiting and starts talking.

There is a structural point underneath this too, and it has to be said carefully, because it is not an insult to anyone. By the report's own figures there are some 5,600 removals firms in this country, and the body that speaks for much of this document represents around 350 of them. Roughly one in sixteen. That is no criticism of the work it does for the firms inside it. But it is a simple fact with an unavoidable consequence: no single association, speaking for that share of the trade, can be the whole of the industry's voice. The case for a wider, reclaimed, properly parliamentary representation is not a slight against any one organisation. It is the arithmetic. The sector needs a voice larger than any club, and the forum for it is sitting open and unattended.

06 · The recommendations

Why the recommendations cannot work

The report calls its ten recommendations "practical." I do not think they are, and they are impractical for two reasons that follow from everything above.

First, they sit downstream of a diagnosis that misreads what the sector is, what drives its costs and where its burdens fall. A recommendation built on a misdescription cannot be fit for purpose, however reasonable it sounds in isolation. They are precise answers aimed at a sector that does not exist, the one the foreword imagined.

Second, and more fundamentally, you cannot make practical recommendations to an institution you have given no way to receive them. The report asks government for ten things and never asks for the one thing that would make any of them deliverable: a seat at the table. A list of requests addressed to no one is not a recommendation. It is a hope.

And when you weigh the ten, that is roughly what survives. Two have real merit: extending genuine professional standards and accreditation to the sector, and ensuring decarbonisation is phased and sector-appropriate rather than scrapping serviceable vehicles before their time. Two, out of ten. The rest are not removals asks at all but housing-process reforms wearing our colours, or behaviour problems dressed as policy, or the industry asking government to do its own job for it.

Take the most revealing example. The report asks government to legislate the stress out of moving day, by mandating a gap between exchange and completion and key release by one in the afternoon. But the chaos of moving day is not a failure of legislation. It is a failure of professional guidance. Anyone who has run these jobs a thousand times knows the advice: do not book your move for the day you exchange. Pay for a week of storage, stay a couple of nights with family, build in a buffer, because mistakes happen and the people who do this for a living know they happen. When I migrate a company's IT systems, I do not switch the old one off at one minute to nine and the new one on at nine. I build an overlap, deliberately, because that is what a professional does with anything that matters. The moving-day disaster the report wants Parliament to fix is, in most cases, the avoidable consequence of an industry not passing its own expertise on to its customers. We are asking Westminster to legislate away a problem we could solve by being better at our jobs.

What follows is the part the report should have been. Not thirty pages of an industry asking to be rescued, but a few of an industry that knows what it is, makes its own case, and asks from a position of standing. The why, what we are, what we do, and then the asks.

07 · The case

The return: why this is worth a busy government's time

So, before anything is asked of anyone, the bottom line. Why should a government with a hundred fires to fight spend any attention on this one? Because it is one of the cheapest levers it has, and almost nobody is asking it to pull it.

Start with what is happening in the country right now. The cost of living is forcing a wave of people to downsize, and people who downsize do not throw their lives away. They store them. Rentals are rising and rented life is less stable, which means more moves, more transitions, more belongings in temporary keeping. Demand for the joined-up service, the move and the store under one roof, is climbing at exactly the moment the sector is least equipped to meet it well. And because nobody is encouraging the flywheel from the top, the customer ends up buying the move from one place and the storage from another, fragmented, more expensive, and with more seams for things to go wrong across. The country is pushing people into moving and storing at scale, and then leaving them to assemble it themselves from disconnected parts. A supported, professional, joined-up sector is cheaper and safer for the public precisely when the public most needs it.

Then consider who actually depends on these firms. It is not only households. The local removals and storage company is, quietly, part of the public realm. Councils and the NHS store equipment, records and goods with local providers. The infrastructure of the state runs, in part, on the warehouses of this industry. An operator ground down on margin, forced to strip cost out to survive against the bottom of the market, delivers a worse and less reliable service to the very public bodies that rely on it. Strengthen the sector and you improve the supply chain underneath your own institutions.

And then there is what a healthier sector would do with room to breathe. An operator who is not being driven into the ground has money to invest, and when this industry invests in modern tools the service does not improve by a rounding error. It improves by a step. Moves run faster, more stock can be held, goods can be found and returned more quickly, the whole thing becomes more reliable. When an industry finally adopts the technology available to it, its capacity rises and its bottleneck shifts outward. That is productivity, in a sector that turns over more than a billion pounds and carries out hundreds of thousands of moves a year. Margin pressure from an unregulated bottom is not just a problem for operators. It is a brake on the productivity of a load-bearing part of the economy. The investment Britain is being asked to make here is mostly recognition. The return is a population more willing to move, public institutions better served, and a sector finally able to get more productive. There are not many levers in housing policy that cheap.

What we are

But the case is not only economic, and a government that only hears the economics will have missed the better half of it.

This is one of the last industries in Britain that takes a young person who was never going to thrive at school, who has no interest in construction, who does not fit the standard tracks the system offers, and gives them a real career with a real ceiling. Not a stopgap job. A trade, a craft, a path. There are managing directors and chief executives in this sector today who started as porters, carrying boxes down a flight of stairs, and who now run businesses. That ladder still exists here when it has vanished almost everywhere else, and it exists for exactly the people the rest of the economy struggles hardest to place. At a moment when the country talks endlessly about skills and opportunity, here is an industry that simply delivers both, without being asked to.

And look at what this industry is, in the places where people live. The local café is closing. The local grocer, the local bakery, the local pub, the local bank, all going, one by one, from every high street in the country. The texture of local commerce is being hollowed out. And the local removals firm is one of the last ones standing. Not only standing, but present in number, in every town, owned locally, employing locally, often run by the same family across generations. These are not faceless units that move objects from A to B. They are among the final frontiers of genuine local business in this country, and they are part of its heritage. That is worth protecting, not because the sector is sentimental, but because a country that lets the last of its local businesses go has lost something it will not get back.

What we do

So here, finally assembled in one place, is the value the report scattered across four sections and never joined together.

In residential moving, we are the thing that decides whether a person's most stressful day goes right or goes wrong, and through that, whether they are willing to do it again. We carry the orchestration, the planning, the honest expectations, the experience of having seen every variable a move can throw at a family who will do this only a handful of times in their lives. We are the difference between a completed chain and a collapsed one, between a household that moves again gladly and one that swears never to repeat it.

In international moving, we are the part of this trade most people never see and most policymakers never consider: the coordination of a move across borders, by sea, air and road, through customs and documentation and destination handling, where a single failure of planning can strand a family's entire life in a container on the wrong continent. It is some of the most complex logistics this country performs for ordinary people, and it is a quiet piece of Britain's standing as a place people are willing to come to and leave from.

In commercial relocation, I will not improve on what is already in this report, because the report already contains the best account of it. Sarah Cole's section makes the case precisely: that a botched data-centre, laboratory or office move can take an organisation offline for weeks, that complex relocation is genuine economic infrastructure performed under extraordinary time pressure, that the skill involved is real and specialised. It is the strongest passage in the document and it needs no rewriting from me. I have paraphrased rather than reproduced it, out of respect for her authorship, and I would point any reader to the original. I include it here only because this is the place the whole picture finally sits together, residential, international and commercial, side by side, as one industry rather than three disconnected essays.

08 · The asks

The asks

The report's mistake was to ask everything of government and nothing of itself. So here are the asks the right way round, sorted by who has to act, and beginning with us. Four audiences, plainly, the way a real plan reads.

Coda

Respect, not rescue

What the sector is asking for, underneath all of it, is not handouts. It is to be seen correctly. As a lever, not a load. As an industry that determines mobility rather than merely surviving it, that gives forgotten kids real careers, that keeps a genuine local business alive on high streets where almost nothing else has survived.

And the way you earn that, the only way, is to stop behaving like a passenger. To do the work, and then to point at the work as the reason you deserve to be heard. To make yourself good enough, visibly, and to stop waiting for someone to come and certify that you are.

This document is my attempt to do exactly that. Not to ask that the industry's case be made for it, but to make it. Their report ran to thirty pages and asked to be rescued. This one runs to three and asks only to be recognised. Because we will not get Britain moving by waiting to be rescued. We will get it moving by remembering that moving is the thing we do, and by finally deciding it is worth doing like we mean it.

A closing honesty

Being right about the diagnosis is the easy half. Anyone clear-eyed and unencumbered can stand outside an institution and see its soft spots, especially someone whose whole professional training is spotting exactly these gaps and finding ways to close them. What is hard, and what I have not done and cannot do from here, is carry a 125-year-old membership body, with hundreds of firms and their competing interests, an elected president, a board, genuine obligations to existing members, and real people, from where it is to where it should be. That is the difficult work, and it belongs to the people inside.

So I make no claim to have done the hard part. I have only tried to make the argument, as clearly and as honestly as I can, from the one position I actually hold: outside, looking in, with respect for the people doing the work and the conviction that the industry deserves a better account of itself than it has been giving. If any of it resonates with those inside who want the same things, then it will have done its job.

Sam ClarkFounder, Moovi