DPD is to invest £150m into a new parcel hub in Hinckley, Leicestershire, that will generate 750 jobs after planning permission was granted for the site on which it will stand.
The new hub will be the fifth in the UK for the company and will be two miles from its most recent openings Hub 4 and International Gateway in Sketchley, which both opened in 2015. Hub 5 will be capable of handling 71,000 parcels an hour, increasing DPD’s total overnight parcel sorting capacity by 60%.
Hinckley & Bosworth Borough Council has granted planning permission for a new 82 acre employment park, close to junction 1 of the M69, proposed by IM Properties. DPD’s 39 acre site within the park will include a 503m long, 276,454 sq ft main hub building. Building work is likely to commence in October and the hub should be operational by October 2020.
Dwain McDonald, DPD’s CEO, said he was pleased to be announcing the investment in infrastructure. “We are continuing to experience strong growth in demand for our services, which is why we are announcing another massive hub project less than three years after we opened hub 4. In that time, we have seen seismic changes in retail behaviour in the UK, with major events like Black Friday creating bigger and longer periods of high demand at different times during the year, and then Christmas itself becoming even more of an online retail focused event,” he said.
“We have invested hugely in our infrastructure nationwide over the last six years, moving our older depots to brand new, larger and purpose-built facilities or upgrading them to state-of-the-art 60,000 sq ft distribution centres. By 2020 we will have built three of the largest overnight sorting hubs in Europe,” he said.
Image credit: DPD
