Two American states already charge for home delivery. Here is what Lancashire would get.

Ten days ago I wrote here about a letter I had posted to the prime minister asking for a pound on every parcel delivered to a home in the country. Since then it has been on the front page of local newspapers and taken apart by several hundred people on LinkedIn. Some of them were right. More on that below.

The most useful thing I have learned since is that this is not a new idea. Two American states are already doing it.

Minnesota brought in a retail delivery fee on 1 July 2024. Fifty cents on any delivery where the order is $100 or more. Colorado did it two years earlier. Neither state fell over. Neither state's online retailers packed up and left.

What matters is how they built it, because the design answers most of the objections I have had thrown at me.

The fee is charged to the retailer, not the courier. That closes the door on any operator with its own delivery fleet sitting outside the system. It can be shown as its own line on the receipt, so the customer sees exactly what it is and where it goes. Collect your order from the shop yourself, or from a kerbside pickup, and there is no charge at all. And the money is ringfenced by law to a transport fund rather than disappearing into general revenue.

Then there is the exemption. Minnesota does not count parcels. It counts turnover. If your sales in the state last year were under $1m, you are outside the fee entirely. Colorado sets its threshold at $500,000.

That last point is where the LinkedIn commenters were right and I was wrong. My original proposal exempted anyone sending fewer than 5,000 parcels a year. Three separate people pointed out that a parcel count is a poor measure of size. A business shipping 20,000 items at £8 is smaller than one shipping 5,000 at £200, and a volume threshold says the opposite. So I have changed it. A turnover test, or the charge applied as a percentage capped at £1. Minnesota got there first.

Now the number that should interest anyone reading this in Lancashire.

Around 3bn parcels a year land on doorsteps in this country. A pound on each is roughly £3bn pounds a year, close to 58m a week and double that in December. Amazon would pay somewhere between £600m and £750m of it against a UK turnover of around £30bn. Amazon, Temu and Shein between them would pay somewhere around £1bn. At the moment they pay nothing to the street the van drives down.

Lancashire's share, worked out on population and delivery density, would be about £68m a year. Every year. Not a bid, not a competitive round, not a pot that closes in March. Sixty per cent to transport and 40 per cent to business improvement districts, markets and town centres, returned to the council area the parcel landed in.

For context, the Ribble Valley's share alone would be close to £3m a year. Hyndburn's about £3.5m. Preston's around £6.5m. I have spent 15 years watching councils chase grants a fraction of that size and lose.

The principle, it turns out, is no longer in dispute. In his Commons statement on 1 September the prime minister described an economic model that lets wealth be extracted from places and siphoned out, and committed to fiscal devolution starting with a visitor levy that mayors can set from next year. That is a locally set, place based charge. The government has accepted the idea. It has just not pointed it at the thing that emptied the high street.

The other half of the letter is about what is coming through the door. Anything under £135 enters the country with no customs duty. Anything declared a gift under £35 enters with no import VAT either. Temu's entire model is built on those two reliefs. The EU shut its equivalent in July. The United States shut its own last year. Ours stays open until October 2028.

In May, 15 national retailers, Marks and Spencer, Next, Primark and Currys among them, wrote to Downing Street asking for a charge on those parcels before Christmas trading. They were right. What has been missing from that coverage is the view from the other end. A maker in Clitheroe or Darwen pays UK duty, UK VAT, UK wages and UK safety compliance, then competes with a parcel from Guangdong that has paid none of it. And European consumer testing last year found 69 per cent of products bought from overseas businesses failed safety standards. Toys that choke. Chargers that catch fire. Cheaper is not the same as better. The release went to the retail trade press this week with that testing in it, alongside the Minnesota comparison.

So the ask has moved on. Not a pound on a parcel as an idea. A pound on a parcel as a policy with a working precedent in two jurisdictions, a small seller exemption the online retailers themselves designed, and a principle the prime minister has already conceded.

The letter went by post to Number 10 North on Lincoln Square. It has not had a reply yet. If anyone reading this has a route to the people who open that post, I would be glad of it.

Dan Johnson is co founder of Crafty Vintage and runs the Whalley Monthly Artisan Market and the Lytham St Annes Artisan Market.