End of Road and Rail Liaison
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By C. S. Dunbar, Minst.T.
FOR more than 20 years Section 19 of the Road Traffic Act, 1930, has been as fixed in the minds of road transport operators as the date 1066 in that of the schoolboy. Now another Clause 19 has to be considered—and it is a far more sinister threat to the haulier's future than the other. 1 refer to Section 19 of the revised Transport Bill, which must be considered together with Clause 18.
To give the 'railways freedom in competition, these Clauses sweep away what have been the two fundamental bases of the whole railway rates structure since 1854 and 1888—the obligation to have all rates in force available for public inspection. The railways will now have to publish only their maximum authorized rates, which may not be the actual rates charged.
How will this change, coming at a time when the Road Haulage Executive is being broken up, affect the work that was initiated in the "Square Deal" talks of 1938-39? The freedom that the railways are now to have was their main aim then and the road transport associations were most alarmed about it. They formed a liaison committee to present a united front to the railway general managers, and it was a delegation from this body that signed the agreement leading to the setting up of the Road and Rail Control Conference.
Trial and Error in Rates Briefly, the railways agreed to use their freedom to establish continuous liaison with the road operators, so that in course of time the two parties would have common conditions of carriage and the road industry a statutory rates structure which could be set alongside the railway rate book. As the exploratory work went on in 1939 and the early years of the war, it became obvious that the creation of a road rates structure could not be on a uniform hypothetical basis in the first instance, but would have to be the product of trial and error, in one or two areas, or with a few traffics.
Had the R.H.E. been allowed to continue its consolidation, the time would not have been far distant when it .would have produced uniform rates throughout its own organization. In a few more years, force of circumstances would have brought the rates of independent carriers to the same level. The dissolution of the R.H.E. will halt this process and will have the effect of abolishing the standard nation-wide conditions of carriage that the Executive has introduced.
Does this mean that all the work that has been done towards co-ordination of rates is to be scrapped? It would seem so. The R.H.E. will be broken up into so many units that the position on the road side will approximate to that of 1939, with a multitude of operators all charging what they like and most of them not bothering about conditions. It is unlikely that the interworking arrangements and rates agreements that did exist in some sections of the trade will be revived immediately, and to that extent the industry will be even more amorphous than it was in 1939.
Back to 1939 Agreement ?
Assuming that the re-entrants and newcomers are members of the Road Haulage Association—and there is no guarantee that they will be—does the Association intend to seek a reaffirmation of the 1939 agreement with the railways, with the remainder of the R.H.E. joined in as a third party?
If nothing is done, the competition and consequent rate-cutting between the British Transport Commission's undertakings and other long-distance carriers will be bound in time to have an adverse affect on short-distance operators. Long-distance men finding things difficult in their own line will be tempted to " horn-in " on shortdistance work. The railways might use their freedom to cut the ground from under local operators' feet.
4, It is true that the Bill contains a clause giving a road operator the right to complain to the Transport Tribunal if cut rail rates threaten to put him out of business, but this protection is of doubtful value as he has to prove that the rates he is complaining of "if continued must result in a loss to the Commission." When one considers the difficulty of assessing the incidence of the fixed charges in railway costs, let alone the working expenses relating to particular types of traffic, anyone trying to take advantage of this " protection" will be a bold man!