You may be holding their goods, and your trading conditions may give you more leverage than a letter — provided they were incorporated.
Freight and haulage carry two things most sectors do not: possession of somebody else's goods, and a set of trading conditions that materially change your position — if they were incorporated.
Standard trading conditions in this sector — RHA, BIFA and the international conventions for carriage — carry provisions on charges, liability and, importantly, lien. Whether they apply to your job depends on incorporation in the usual way: referenced at the time of contracting, not printed on the delivery note afterwards.
The first thing we establish is which set of conditions actually governs, because it changes what you can claim and what you may hold.
A lien — holding goods against unpaid charges — is the fastest leverage in the sector and the easiest to get wrong. Whether you have one, whether it is general or particular, and what you may do with the goods all depend on the conditions and on the facts. Exercising a lien you do not have is conversion, and the damages claim will exceed the invoice.
If you are holding goods now against an unpaid account, that is a same-day conversation rather than an email. The leverage decays and the risk does not.
Charges for waiting, storage and failed deliveries are routinely written off because they feel like goodwill. They are contractual sums like any other where the conditions provide for them, and at volume they are a material part of an aged ledger.
Haulage ledgers are long lists of modest invoices, and the statutory compensation sum attaches to every one. That changes the economics of chasing a ledger that individually looks not worth the trouble.
Only if you actually have a lien, and its scope depends on the conditions that govern the job and the facts. Get it wrong and you are converting someone else's property. Tell us today rather than next week — the leverage is real but so is the risk.
Then the evidence is your paperwork: the POD, the tracking record, the driver's record and any signature. Electronic PODs are usually stronger than people assume, provided the audit trail can be exported.
Where the applicable conditions provide for them, yes — they are contractual charges and they attract statutory interest like anything else. The obstacle is almost always incorporation, not entitlement.
That is a jurisdiction and enforcement question before it is a debt question, and we would rather tell you it is outside what we do than take the instruction. Where the debtor is a UK entity of an international group there is usually more to work with than people assume.
The letter-before-action checklist, the interest and compensation rules, and the escalation ladder with what each step costs. One email, no sequence.
Tell us what you are owed and who owes it. You get back what the debt is actually worth once interest and compensation are added, what we would do first, and the fixed fee for doing it.