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'EDITOR'S COMMENT
Page 5
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CABOTAGE CHAOS
• After all the talking, the threats and the counter-threats, after union job-loss warnings and trade association free-enterprise lobbying, cabotage has finally arrived.
Should the British road haulage industry be jumping for joy, or cowering in the corner? Has Transport Minister Michael Portillo got it right when, having fought our case in Europe, he predicts we "will do well because our industry operates already in a deregulated market"? The answer to the first question is "neither", and to the second question "yes — probably". The age of European cabotage has hardly dawned with deregulation writ large. The tired old idea of permits has returned to haunt us and the International Road Freight Office in Westgate Road, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, will once again have to dish out a hopelessly low British allocation of licences.
In the mid-1980s our international hauliers were crippled by an idiotic international freight permit quota system which put the cart before the horse. You could only get a decent number of permits if you had used all of your allocation the previous year and proved your 'need'. God help you if you were new to the game and had not used any permits the previous year. A thriving black market developed and too few British permits, coupled with an inane allocation method, left our market flagging.
Who on earth decided that the British allocation of cabotage permits should be based on this disgraced system? Less than 15 million people live in the Netherlands compared with our 57 million — but someone, somewhere thinks that the Dutch, and the Germans, need twice as many cabotage permits as we do.
We should all hope — and lobby for — the immediate and proper introduction of cabotage across the Community if we are going to do it at all. Our hauliers are sharp enough and hungry enough to go out and find point-to-point haulage work across the Channel. The vested interests of West Germany's over-regulated ,--and antiquated freight transport market must not be allowed to kill us off before we have begun.