How to Reduce Empty Miles in a Removals Fleet

Empty running is a real transport problem

Empty running is not unique to removals.

The Department for Transport reported that GB-registered HGVs travelled 31 per cent of their vehicle kilometres empty in 2025.

That is a road-freight statistic rather than a removals-industry statistic, so it should not be used as a removals benchmark.

It does establish the wider point: expensive road capacity regularly travels without carrying a load.

For a removals operator, the useful question is its own number.

How many miles did the fleet travel? How many were customer-delivery miles? How many were positioning? How many were created by poor sequencing? How many were genuinely unavoidable?

Measure miles against jobs, not only vehicles

A fuel bill tells you what the fleet consumed. It does not automatically explain why.

To reduce empty running, mileage needs job context.

Where did the vehicle start? Which job was it serving? Where did that job finish? Where was the next job? Was the vehicle returning to depot because policy required it? Could a collection have been paired with the return journey? Was a different vehicle already closer?

A map can show where the vehicle travelled.

The operating system can explain what work it was doing.

Plan geography before the diary becomes fixed

One of the easiest ways to create dead miles is to book appointments or minor jobs independently.

A customer in one town gets the morning. Another nearby customer gets tomorrow afternoon. A surveyor crosses the same region twice. A van returns to the area two days later for a collection.

Each decision can make sense in isolation. The waste appears across the week.

Planning should therefore consider geography before the diary becomes difficult to change.

The same principle applies to survey appointments, crate deliveries, box collections and storage access work.

Think about where the vehicle finishes

Traditional planning often starts with depot departure.

The more useful question is where the vehicle will finish.

A vehicle completing work fifty miles from base is not simply "done". It is a resource sitting fifty miles from base.

The next decision should consider that location.

Is there a compatible collection nearby? Is another job heading back toward the depot? Is there trade work that can be paired? Should the vehicle return immediately, or is there useful work that avoids a dead return?

This is basic transport logic, but it becomes hard to apply consistently when the day's information is scattered across calls, diaries and spreadsheets.

Backloads can help, but privacy and service rules matter

Backloading is one of the obvious ways to reduce empty running.

A vehicle completing a delivery can carry another compatible load on the return journey rather than travelling empty.

Within one company, this can be relatively straightforward where timings, capacity and service commitments align.

Across different companies, it becomes more complex.

Customer confidentiality, commercial sensitivity, custody, insurance, data sharing and service accountability all matter.

Technology can help match available capacity without automatically exposing customer-identifiable information, but the operating and legal model must be designed deliberately.

The principle should be:

match capacity first; disclose only the information required for the authorised transaction.

Use the right vehicle

Empty mileage is not the only fleet inefficiency.

A vehicle that is too large for the job may carry unnecessary running cost. A vehicle that is too small may create a second journey.

Survey accuracy therefore affects fleet mileage.

If the estimated volume is wrong, the transport plan can be wrong before the vehicle leaves the yard.

That is why estimate-versus-actual data matters to fleet planning as well as pricing.

Connect telematics to the job

Telematics can provide location, mileage and vehicle events.

On its own, that is fleet data.

Connected to the job, it becomes operational information.

The company can compare planned route versus actual route, planned mileage versus actual mileage, vehicle used versus vehicle planned, time on site versus travel and depot returns versus onward work.

That turns the question from "where is the van?" into "why did this job consume this mileage?"

Route optimisation should support human planning

Software can compute combinations and routes faster than a person.

That does not mean the algorithm understands every operational constraint automatically.

Customers have timing commitments. Drivers need legal breaks. Large vehicles have access restrictions. Crews cannot teleport between jobs.

A valuable optimisation system includes those constraints and lets experienced operations staff work the exceptions.

It should reduce repetitive calculation, not pretend judgement is obsolete.

Architecture matters when routing becomes connected

Once route and fleet data feeds planning, the operator is connecting several systems.

The removal platform may own the job. A telematics provider may own vehicle telemetry. A mapping provider may calculate routes.

Application, infrastructure and cybersecurity may therefore span several organisations.

The buyer should understand what happens when one service is unavailable and which system remains the operational source of truth.

Cloud does not remove responsibility. It changes where responsibility sits.

Who gets the biggest benefit?

A one-vehicle company naturally has fewer route combinations.

As the fleet grows, the number of possible allocations rises quickly.

Around five vehicles, the operations team may already be making enough daily choices for route and resource visibility to matter.

At ten or twenty vehicles, small repeated mileage inefficiencies can become materially important.

International, trade and multi-site work can create even more opportunities for positioning and backloads.

Moovi is designed for that professional stage.

Young, modern and proven

Moovi is a young company built on modern architecture and is live in production with multiple removals and storage customers across two continents.

Its current optimisation capability connects resource allocation and operational reconciliation on the same record as the move.

The useful procurement question is not whether a platform has a map. It is whether route and mileage information can become part of the commercial and operational decision.

Implementation starts with measurement

Moovi uses structured implementation and training over a period of weeks.

For fleet optimisation, the first step should be establishing the operator's real rules and baseline data: sites, vehicle types, working areas, regular trade flows, driver requirements and known access constraints.

Without accurate operating inputs, route optimisation can produce mathematically tidy but operationally useless answers.

The commercial consequence

Every avoidable mile consumes fuel, vehicle life and paid time.

Reducing empty running can also release vehicle capacity without purchasing another asset.

The cost of inaction is not simply a larger fuel bill. It is expensive fleet capacity spending more time moving itself than moving customer work.

Frequently asked questions

What are empty miles in removals?

Empty miles are vehicle kilometres travelled without carrying useful load. Some are unavoidable positioning; others may be reduced through planning, sequencing, backloads or better allocation.

What percentage of removals miles are empty?

There is no reliable UK removals-industry percentage established in this guide. Department for Transport statistics show 31 per cent empty running for GB-registered HGV vehicle kilometres in 2025, but that should not be treated as a removals benchmark.

Can telematics reduce empty mileage?

Telematics provides the data. The reduction comes from using location and mileage information alongside job, capacity and planning data to make better allocation decisions.

Can removal companies share backloads?

Potentially, but cross-company matching requires careful commercial, privacy, insurance, custody and service rules. Matching capacity does not require exposing more customer data than necessary.

Sources

• Department for Transport, Domestic Road Freight Statistics 2025: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/road-freight-statistics-2025/domestic-road-freight-statistics-united-kingdom-2025
• Moovi Optimisation and Reconciliation: optimisation