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PREPARED FOR THE WORST
Page 83
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BOTH the chairman of the Road Haulage Association and the president of the Traders Road Transport Association have given a cautious greeting ("welcome" would be too strong a word) to the new Government. Neither of them repeated in its usual form the plea to be left alone to get on with the job of carrying the nation's goods. No doubt they realized that the plea would carry little weight at the present time when the Minister of Transport is holding to her proclaimed intention of issuing a White Paper on integration in due course.
Operators may not be able to restrain their anxiety for long. They would be more resigned to the waiting period if they could be sure that the White Paper would deal with its subject with no preconceived ideas on the conclusions to be reached. Unfortunately, they cannot be sure. They have no way of telling whether the document will merely set out the methods most likely to achieve the desired result. The growing suspicion that the result has already been determined is strengthened by an examination of the Labour Party's election manifesto.
Not much was heard about the section on transport during the election campaign. There would have been little point in drawing attention to it when public opinion decisively lay elsewhere. Criticism might in any case have been misunderstood of proposals which relied heavily for their effect on frequent references to planning. There is a general impression that the transport system needs to be examined.
PECULIAR WORDING IN MANIFESTO
The Government can claim that the manifesto gives it freedom to do almost anything it pleases. The wording is in some respects peculiar. There is to be a National Transport Plan. Its details are not given but several points are mentioned which will be carried out within its "framework". There will be an expanding road programme with new methods of financing highway development. Road and rail will he co-ordinated and a National Freight Authority will deal with the movement of freight by both forms of transport. Regional and area transport authorities will be set up to provide more effective public transport by means of integration. The ports will be reorganized and modernized by means of a strong National Ports Authority.
To the ordinary view these items appear to constitute A fairly comprehensive plan in their own right. All that remains is to work out the details. In its perhaps understandable enthusiasm the manifesto has skipped the early chapters. Instead of a precise statement of basic policy there is an attack on what purports to be a description of the policy followed by the Conservative Party when in office. Its attempted solution to the transport problems. says the manifesto, was to increase competition between road and rail, to adopt rigid commercial criteria for the railways and other public transport services, and to promote the "deliberate fragmentationof transport undertakings. The "most conspicuous and most costly of all its failures" was in the field of transport.
Good knockabout electioneering stuff though this may be, it offers little help towards an understanding of Labour Party policy. One can only assume that on each specified point the Government will move as far as possible in a direction opposite to that which the Conservatives are alleged to have followed.
What principles will govern this radical change of direction? In the first place the railways must be retained. This would be a natural assumption in view of the power of the railway unions, apart from the internal evidence to be found in the manifesto. In the second place the railways must no longer make losses. In the third place fragmentation must be reversed; in other words road and rail transport—or at the very least the nationalized sectors—must be integrated as closely as possible.
If these are indeed to be the ruling principles of the new Government, there will flow from them conclusions for the most part highly unsatisfactory to the road operator. If the railways are to continue and to be made financially viable, a good deal of profitable traffic will have to be transferred to them. It is difficult to see how this can be done otherwise than by compulsion. If fragmentation is a fault, then British Road Services must be forced once again into a railway-dominated orbit. If competition is wrong, the right to compete must be taken away from hauliers—or at any rate the right to compete with the reunited
nationalized organization. In the last resort the trader will lose the freedom to run his own vehicles.
As the law governing the licensing system constantly reminds us. the interests to be considered are primarily those of the public. When there are general advantages to be gained road operators may be constrained to swallow their grievances or to expect little sympathy. The elimination of railway losses, assuming that this can be achieved by such a policy as I have outlined, may seem to bring certain benefits by taking an annual burden away from the taxpayer and, in theory at least, by diverting some traffic from the overcrowded roads.
OTHER SIDE OF THE BALANCE There arc weightier items on the other side of the balance. In the long run the compulsory diversion of traffic to rail will add to the costs of the transport user and ultimately to the prices paid by the public for commodities of all kinds. Experience has shown also that the increasing predominance of road transport is not the result of caprice on the part of the user but to the more efficient service which he receives. Any loss in that efficiency will again react unfavourably on the welfare of the "man in the street".
This analysis of a possible Government policy and of its possible effects has been made from a point of view which is admittedly extreme, although it is also one with which operators are familiar. It is as well to beprepared for the worst. The old hackneyed arguments against the extreme Socialist dogma as applied to transport must be refurbished. At the same time new arguments may have to be prepared to meet new circumstances.
If the worst came to the worst it might become necessary to question the very basis on which the Government may even now be preparing its elaborate plans. For example, it may no longer be necessary to accept that the railways must always be kept in being. The so-called transport problem, when it is analysed, often turns out to be solely a railway problem. When road operators so frequently are called upon to justify their existence they have a right to ask that their less successful competitor should be under a similar obligation.