DPD UK has announced that work on the new £150m state-of-the-art parcel hub in Hinckley, Leicestershire, is progressing well.
Aerial footage shows the foundations of the around 25,000 sqm large main hub building as well as infrastructure work taking place. In April last year, DPD UK announced the investment, planning for 750 jobs to be created.
In January 2019, Winvic Construction Ltd began construction and the main buildings are to be completed by February 2020. Then, until December 2021, the engineering fit-out will run; with the facility becoming operational in 2022. On an average day, around 200 construction workers will be working on site.
According to DPD, the new hub will be its fifth in the UK and the largest domestic parcel hub in Europe. As part of the 82 acre Hinckley Park development, it will be located close to J1 of the M69, being delivered by IM Properties. Two other key DPD sites will be just about 3 km away from the new one. Hub 4 and the firm's International Gateway both opened in Sketchley in 2015.
The new Hub 5 site is the size of 22 football pitches. With a width of 40 m, the main hub will be 502 m long. Out of all DPD locations, it will be the most secure and technologically advanced hub, equipped with the very latest fully automated sortation technology, the optical character recognition software to automatically scan address information, over 300 security cameras and more than 3,000 metres of conveyor.
When fully operational, DPD is planning for the hub to sort 72,000 parcels per hour.
Dwain McDonald, CEO of DPD UK, explained: "It is fantastic to see our fifth hub starting to take shape. Hinckley is already a strategically key location for us but having two giant hubs there in future, separate from our West Midlands hubs, gives us a huge amount of operational flexibility to cope with major volume peaks or traffic issues on the network.
"When Hub 5 opens we will have three of the largest fully automated parcel hubs in Europe and the overnight sorting capacity to support our retail customers for many years to come. In the last seven years we've also invested in over 30 purpose built regional depots and larger distribution centres around the country to ensure that we have the best and most efficient network infrastructure in the industry.”
