ON THE DOLE
Page 70
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BEFORE long, if not already, the politicians will be just where the railway lobby want them. Public opinion, even as reflected in the Press, is coming more and more to accept as inevitable that some kind of subsidy will have to be paid to. the British Transport Commission to help the railways out of the hole they have been digging for themselves.
As if inspired from the Ivory Tower, opinions differ only on the amount of the subsidy and the particular items of cost that it should be designed to meet. The most modest proposal is that the Treasury should contribute whatever extra wages are to be paid under the Guiflebaud award. Another suggestion is that the Government should take over liability for interest on transport stock. A moratorium has also been advocated to enable the Commission to start with a clean sheet while avoiding the enervating effect of a regular dole.
The method does not matter a great deal. Once the money is paid or remitted, it is gone for good. There have been warnings over the years that this has probably happened in any case. Nearly £2,000m. has been lent to the Commission on no security in the accepted use of the term. Little or none of this money will ever come back, il n d it is difficult to imagine that the Commission will even be able to pay the interest.
Apart from what cannot be avoided, a few people are hardy enough to continue asking Why it is necessary to pay anything. They believe in a simple version of the theory of evolution. Just as the railways made the stagecoach obsolete, so they are themselves being superseded by the more modern form of transport. This harsh point* of view needs to be put forward even more strongly at the present time. On the level of polite discussion, the Government and the public may easily become the victims of a confidence trick, and a slap in the face is, perhaps, the best way to bring them to their senses.
Provided nobody asks awkward or brutal questions, the Commission can often make rings round their critics. Each year is published the suave and ostensibly welldocumented annual report, and latterly there has been an appraisal and a reappraisal, shortly to be followed, no doubt, by a re-reappraisal. From the Ivory Tower comes an endless stream of figures in every possible permutation and combination.
Somebody Is Rude
While the public are content with the figures the Commission choose to give them, everything is harmonious. It is only when somebody is rude enough to ask for something else that the difficulties begin. Two good examples may be found in adjoining answers to written questions in the House of Commons not long ago. Mr. Arthur Lewis, a Socialist M.P., wanted to know about the annual interest charges paid by British Road Services. A Conservative M.P., Mr. Ronald Bell, asked the approximate value at current market prices of the Commission's land.
Information on both points would obviously be useful in the coming discussions. The Minister of Transport, however, had to admit that he could not give the answers. The capital liability of B.R.S. represented by transport stock, said Mr. Marpies, could not be distinguished from the total issues of the stock. Similarly, he had no figure for the current market value of the land. "This could be obtained only after very considerable work of survey and valuation."
E28 There is another set of figures that many people would like to know. The gross receipts of the railways are shown in each year's accounts under the main headings of passengers, freight and miscellaneous, each one being further subdivided in another table. Also available are the working expenses and the central charges, split up in considerable detail. There is no way of telling from the accounts, nor, presumably, from questions in Parliament, how the expenditure is divided between goods and passengers.
Important conclusions might be drawn from the information if it were available. Much of the discussion about the Commission is concerned with the component parts. It is suggested that some of them be subsidized and the others left to run at a profit if possible. Another school of thought talks of "hiving off" and selling back to private enterprise •the various activities not directly related to running a transport service. The discussion is governed largely by the way in which the parts are split up in the Commission's own accounts. If the division could be drawn between expenditure on goods and passenger traffic, interest might be stimulated in the possibility of retaining one and disposing of the other.
More Phlegmatic The Commission are not anxious to draw attention to this point. They know that the public have no wish to see the rail passenger services abandoned or even greatly curtailed, whereas they are far more phlegmatic about the fate of the railway goods serVices. Even the car owner is not greatly afraid that there would be much more congestion if all goods travelled by road.
Perhaps the railways still have a future as goods carriers. It remains true that more and more of the traffics once thought to be so suitable for the rail (or for integration) are either dwindling or changing their character. Less and less coal is offered for transport, and trade and industry in general are relying increasingly on the advantages that road haulage gives them for sending their goods in comparatively small quantities.
Passenger traffic by rail has not dwindled over the years. It may be that, if a proper division of costs were possible, the carriage of passengers might be revealed as the better financial proposition. The question would then be whether, taken by itself, passenger transport by rail required a subsidy.
There might be another way of tackling the problem. What is really wanted to satisfy the Commission, the Government and the public is an increase in the number of passengers—and this applies to all public transport, whether by rail or by road. Except, perhaps, in one or two instances it would not be economically sound to Cut fares. The alternative might be, as suggested on more than one occasion, to give a tax rebate, at !east on fares to and from work and possibly on all journeys.
The Treasury should have no diffiquIty in administering a scheme along these lines. Presumably it must be regarded in the last resort as a form of subsidy, but unlike most of the other varieties proposed it would have certain advantages. It would be encouraging the kind of traffic for which the public chiefly need the railways. It would apply fairly to operators of all forms of transport. It would tend to promote a greater use of public transport and it would reduce road congestion by cutting down the number of journeys by car.