Mayor of London Boris Johnson, sometimes known as BoJo, has called on parcel delivery companies to set up more click and collect offices in residential areas of London to curb congestion that seems to be increasing in his opinion, due to a surfeit of delivery vehicles in the city.

The controversial mayor’s major influence in the metropolitan area is in transport, and this seems to be one of the major regular news items in the city’s media as a result. With regard parcel deliveries he called on the parcel delivery industry to help tackle congestion by “building up a more sensible system whereby click and collect stores and hubs are in people’s neighbourhoods”.

He suggested that office workers in London are increasingly doing their shopping online, and having the goods delivered to them at work. Where in his words this is “amazingly convenient” it was, “unquestionably causing congestion because you’ve got so many deliveries now on the streets of London”.

Johnson was quoted as saying: “You’ve got to reduce freight and you’ve got to have a system where big trucks come in, dump the stuff in hubs and then smaller, more environmentally friendly vehicles are able to distribute it through the city in a more logical way.

“We have too many huge, heavy vehicles thundering through the streets without anything in them and we can sort that out.

“We also need to look at managing freight during peak hours and seeing what we can do with the freight operators to reduce that without doing damage to the London economy.”

The likes of Doddle are already offering click and collect services at transport hubs around the metropolitan area, with the company recently claiming that employers are increasingly turning to them to avoid clogging up their mail rooms. With e-commerce rocketing, delivery vehicles will rise in number. The same communications technology is increasingly allowing people to work from home too, so until it is fully researched this may well just be more bombast and hot air from a headline hungry mayor.