Desperate Measures by the R.H.E.
Page 36
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PrtRAFFIC is being lost by the Road Haulage Executive because those who should be seeking business are overloaded with clerical work. The Executive is believed to be deeply concerned over this problem and is searching for a solution of it.
The clogging of administrative machinery with paper is, however, common in unwieldy organizations, and the R.B.E.'s present difficulty was foresew by all those who have had long experience of road transport. The need for additional traffic to reduce the high proportion of empty running, which amounts to 20 per cent. of the total vehicle mileage, is accompanied by an urgent necessity to appease discontented clerks, who are being heaped with work with which they are unfamiliar.
As an immediate measure, in one area at least. drivers are being encouraged to spy on men employed by free hauliers and to report what is .regarded as "unfair competition" to the branch secretary of their trade union or to their group manager. This attempt to strike at independent operators through their own employees is despicable and no self-respecting driver would lend himself to it. The RILE. is clearly trying to use the Transport and General Workers' Union as a secret police force, the main purpose of which would be to supply the evidence on which the Executive might revoke hauliers' permits. Already, hauliers who have secured permits are strictly limited in the loads which they may carry on return journeys, but the thumb-screw is being tightened. Drivers of British Road Services are being told to report to their superiors instances in which traders give preferential treatment to free hauliers in allocating return loads. Efforts will then be made to persuade the independent operator's customers to transfer their patronage to the State transport organization.
Amend the 1947 Act The free haulier has no redress against this kind of competition as the Transport Act is at present framed. It is, therefore, essential that efforts should be made at once to amend the Act, so that some semblance of equity is established between the State transport undertaking and those remaining outside it. During the passage of the Bill, the Government made much of the provision for compensation for those whose businesses were to be acquired, but nothing was said of the intention to use the measure to ruin those who were neither liable to compulsory purchase nor entitled to compensation. The depths of the Government's duplicity have been plumbed and the industry should prepare at once to renew the fight which it lost in Parliament three years ago, and this time to increase its vigour.