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LIONS LED BY DONKEYS
Remember the old childhood game where somebody blindfolded you and you had to try and stick the tail back on the donkey in the right place, while everyone around you laughed at your inevitably doomed attempts? Hauliers might be forgiven for thinking the game is back in vogue, given the recent nonannouncement about road tax rates on new vehicle weights (see news story, page 4). Like many in the industry, CM is at a loss to understand the logic of imposing a heavily compromised set of new maximum weights, then setting a date for their introduction without providing crucial cost information, and finally Fudging the matter of taxation until three months after they are legally introduced to Britain's roads. In all, hauliers will have waited some eight months between the original announcement in July's White Paper and the final version next March. We hope the wait turns out to have been worthwhile but Frankly, we have our doubts. And meanwhile, hauliers find their hands still firmly tied when it comes to investing in new equipment. This is bad for them, of course, but it's also bad news for their customers; it's bad news for the manufacturers and dealers; and it's bad for business in general. You could be forgiven for thinking, as Tate & Lyle Sugars says this week, that an idea of the eventual VED rates must have formed part of the Government's decision to offer 40 and 41 tonne limits in the first place...mustn't they? Whatever the case, the waiting goes on—and until it's cleared up, hauliers have as much chance of investing wisely in vehicles as they have of pinning the tail on that donkey. It may not have been the game the Government intended to play, but until March, at the very least, the baying of asses still sounds out unmistakably in the background.