PARTHIAN SHOT
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JUST when the road transport industry looked like getting through the Parliamentary session without incident, the House of Lords ffred a Parthian shot in the form of an amendment to the Road Traffic and Roads Improvement Bill. It took a day or so for the blow to sink in, and the outcry that followed may be out of proportion to the significance of the change in the law. What road operators felt was confirmation of the suspicion, never completely lulled during the session, that all governments, when it comes to the point, are hostile to them and cannot be trusted.
The point of law involved marks the spot of more than one political battlefield. Section 26 of the Road Traffic Act, 1960, empowers local authorities outside the London traffic area to make traffic regulation orders, which may include .restrictions on the loading and unloading of vehicles. The provision goes back to the Road Traffic Act, 1956. A valuable safeguard forbids the making of orders that would prevent reasonable access for vehicles to premises situated on the roads concerned. There is a proviso to this proviso. A restriction on the loading or unloading of goods will not be regarded as preventing access, reasonable or otherwise.
The second proviso has yet another on its back, so that the complete Section 26 is rather like a series of Chinese boxes one inside the other. The ban on collection and delivery may in fact be regarded as preventing reasonable access if it occupies a total of more than six hours in any consecutive period of 24 hours. This final proviso is the one that Lord Lucas of Chi'worth marked clown for elimination. In theory, therefore, local authorities will now be able to enforce a continuous restriction on loading and unloading, with no consideration whatever for the convenience of shopkeepers and other residents. • This seems so heartless that the official spokesmen have rushed in with the usual reassurances. No local authority, it is said soothingly, would be so harsh or so foolish or so unmindful of the interests of ratepayers as even to contemplate a continuous ban. The argument does not convince the road operator. He has perhaps heard it before, or something much like it, and he naturally asks why it should be thought necessary to pass a law that will never be anything else than a dead letter.
Reasonably Free Hand
On the whole, although he likes restrictions no more than the next person. the road operator agrees that there must be some of, them with the road system as it is at the present time. He also sees the desirability of allowing the authorities a reasonably free hand. He may agree with Lord Derwent that the ideal legislation would be embodied in a form of words' that gave the local authorities the power that Parliament wanted them to have but also preserved reasonable right of access. The Road Traffic Act, 1960, appeared to do this, even if not entirely to the satisfaction of the House of Lords. If the law must be amended, the road operator is anxious that the principle should not be destroyed.
The Government are not impervious to this argument. The official solution of the problem, first set out by Lord Chesham, is a change in the procedure regulations that help put the Road Traffic Acts into effect. Wherever there is a dispute about a loading ban taking up more than six hours out of the 24, it is suggested that the Minister
of Transport should have a report of the local inquiry at least a month before the appropriate order is made. Although the Minister can bring his powers of persuasion to bear on a local authority, if he thinks • it is acting unreasonably, there is apparently no direct provision for an appeal to him. He has power, however, in .certain circumstances to amend or revoke an order, once the local authority has made it, and he may use the power to reduce an inordinate time limit set upon a ban,
More complicated proposals even than this have been known to work out in practice. It still seems a clumsy procedure that apparently makes decisive action by the Minister possible only when the intention he deplores has been put into effect. The road transport interests find the circumstances exhausting enough as they are. Whenever a restriction is proposed on loading and unloading, the road transport organizations—notably the Traders' Road Transport Association and the Road Haulage Association —Usually with the support of local bodies of traders, must 'carry out the lengthy task of lodging objections and mobilizing the opposition.
Regardless of Dogma What has happened with the latest traffic legislation is to road transport operators a typical illustration of standard Government practice regardless of party dogma. Parliament rise this week after nearly a year since the General Election. When they began their period Of office there were high hopes; especially among the carriers of goods. An increased Conservative 'majority faced a disunited Labour Party, and for this state of affairs the contrasted attitude of the two parties towards the transport industry was undoubtedly partly responsible.. Hauliers in particular may have believed, without putting the idea into precise words, that there was now an opportunity for removing some of their grievances.
The political situation is still much the same as it was just after the election, and the road transport industry equally has no progress to show. There has been no relief from taxation. Even the road programme appears, at least to the outside observer, to be slowing down. This may not be true. In road building, especially in Britain, there are so many stages between the dream and the reality that it is difficult to assess the situation at any one time.
On none of the many matters such • as licensing that hauliers discuss with such assiduity are the Government prepared to offer advice or consolation, or even to show. curiosity. The troubles of the railways are discussed interminably in Parliament and by special bodies set up for the purpose, but becauserroad transport operators contrive to remain in business without making a Ioss, their complaints are not thought worth too much attention. The Government show more enthusiasm for restrictions, such as those recently proposed fOr the catriage Of abnormal and indivisible loads exceeding a stated .width or length, or such as the widening of the opportunities for local authori
ties to ban loading and unloading. • • .
All this is an indication of the lines along which. the minds of some road transport operators are working. It may not be an accurate reflection of Government policy or thinking. It is unfortunate, and not altogether the fault of the Government, that the move to enlarge the powers of local authorities should have come just before Parliament rose, so that this is the point road operators are most likely to carry with them on their holidays.