Revised grants for rail hauliers
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by Karen Miles • The Government is making changes to the rail freight grants in order to entice more hauliers and customers into rail partnerships.
The new system, which will be announced soon, follows a review of the grants regime following official complaints about the low take-up of grants by freight users. It also aims to improve the freight grant scheme so that the annual grant allocation is fully spent.
An independent report published last summer by the Government's accounts watchdog, the National Audit Office, accused the Department of Transport of making slow, bureaucratic decisions on the grants' allocations. Between April 1985 and March 1996 the department paid out just £32 million, out of a total provision of £70m. It criticised the department for forcing applicants to always provide assurance of "committed traffic flows over a number of years" before giving out grants.
However, plans to take the responsibility of grants away from the department and put it into a new Strategic Rail Authority are unlikely to receive attention until the Government's long-awaited white paper on transport policy is issued early next year.
El Last month the Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott repeated the Government's commitment to rail freight when he officially opened the Hams Hall rail terminal near Coleshill, Warwickshire, which has been designed to replace one million truck journeys a year by 2006.
L See feature in CM 28 August-3 September.