Identity Disc
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WHAT is taken for granted is often more surprising than the things that cause arguments. Everybody would claim to know what a haulier is. He least of all has any doubts, and it seems. natural and logical for him to join with other hauliers in a national association. At times, however, the differences between hauliers seem much more significant than what they have in common, and but for the accident of legislation they might not easily be recognized as a complete and well-defined industry.
There is not the same confusion among road-passenger operators, MI6 are neatly parcelled off into spheres of influence and are all carrying the same kind of traffic. Hauliers show a much wider variety of functions_ Sonic compete furiously with each other and with the railways for whatever traffic is going, others are highly specialized and have no interest in general goods. It may be wondered why hauliers make a point of having a united body to represent .thern ..every level, whereas the passenger carriers prefer to form several distinct associations.
Without the licensing system there would have been a Very different road haulage industry, or perhaps the industry would not have developed into a recognizable entity. If there are powerful forces pulling hauliers together, there are also important influences separating them. The tendency of the individual operator to specialize is a measure of the attraction towards the industry that he serves. .
• The growing popularity of the contract-A licence and of the C-hiring marginshows that the trader likes to have his own private haulier, and would perhaps go into the transport business himself Were it not for the licensing difficulties. When transport -units were first put on sale, one Or two big concerns seized the opportunity to start up in road haulage with a subsidiary company. Many others might have done the same if they had thought of it in time—and it so happened that the time they had for making up their minds was limited_ The list of suitably large transport units was offered only once before the Government decided that sales had gone far enough.
Paradoxical Conclusion One of the many peculiar features of disposal was that it provided, for a period of five years, A licences that could be bought and sold, and thus revealed that some traders were eager to go into the haulage business_ It is a paradoxical conclusion that, if the licensing restrictions had • not been imposed, there would have been fewer rather than more operators doing work for which they now require an A licence. The tendency might have been even more pronounced than it is for the large organization to build up its own transport system. There was not so long ago a proposal from a group of Conservatives to allow the C-licence holder to carry for hire or reward. The idea appears to have been dropped, but it must have been inspired by a hankering on the part of some traders to become part-time hauliers.
What binds hauliers together, and keeps them as a separate industry, is the licence disc. The owner-driver carrying materials for the new motorways on sub-contract; the heavy haulier with trailers built to carry 100 tons or more; the operator wholly owned by a big industrial concern; the bulk-liquid carrier and the livestock carrier; the long-distance and the short-distance man—all are alike at least in having to hold an A or a B licence.
Perhaps to sonic extent the licensing system explains why
so many of them are not content to remain merely hauliers. They cannot expand in one direction, and their enterprise finds scope in another. They dabble in undertakings even more varied than the haulage industry itself. But there areother reasons for this besides the licensing system. The more a haulier knows about the trade or industry he serves, the more efficient is his service.
There is no better way of learning about ái industry than by having a stake in it. The haulier with outside business interests comes back to road tranSport with new ideas. The lack of such interests is responsible for the " inbreeding " about which Mr. G. W. Quick Smith, a member of the board of management of British Road Services, complained in a paper early this year. Independent hauliers have never found inbreeding a danger. The restrictions upon their enterprise are only within their industry. The world outside is their oyster. It is the walls of the Ivory Tower that seem at times a prison.
Apt Commentaries All this is relevant to the coming debate on ownership of long-distance road haulage. Apt commentaries, 'although certainly they were not intended to have just this shade of meaning, have been made by both the Federation of British Industries and the Association of British Chambers of Commerce in their recent pamphlets on nationalization. The F.B.I. condemn as " artificial " the concept of an industry as something complete in itself, that can be separated and nationalized at leisure.
The economic unit of management is the company, not the industry, say the F.B.I. They give as examples the chemical concern that may find itself dealing in metals or textiles, and the engineering organization that may stretch
out into businesses it has served or is served by. An example even more to the point in view of the direct threat from the Labour Party is the haulier, who so very often is also a garage proprietor, or an engineer, or a farmer, and so on. Even the railway companies, who might have been regarded as self-contained and separate units, were found upon nationalization, much to the surprise and even the embarrassment of some of the Socialists, to run haulage and road passenger businesses, docks, wharves, ships, and even the travel agencies that turn up incongruously year after year in the British Transport Commission's reports.
The F.B.I. write, perhaps deliberately, in the grave .style of the economist, and set down. their opinions as though without any great interest in them one way or the other. The chambers of commerce are more inclined to worry. A nationalized industry, they say, having a monopoly or a partial monopoly, is tempted to extend its field of activity. The B.T.C., for example, might decide to build their own locomotives, or rolling stock, or lorries. They might also launch into trades ancillary to their main business.
The B.T.C. arc, in fact, limited by the 1947 Transport Act. Their powers justify the uneasiness of the chambers of commerce, but they are not allowed to manufacture anything not required for the purposes of their undertaking. They cannot, therefore, as hauliers sometimes do, enter into the field for which they have previously merely done the cartage. It is obviously desirable that this cufb should be placed upon their powers, particularly in view of the losses they have succeeded in making just as operators of transport. It is a fundamental fault of nationalization that the industries taken over have to wall themselves in.