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Janus comments
Page 94
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Student unrest
Happy the man, whose wish and care A ,few paternal acres bound, Content to breathe his native air
In his OWI2 kround
THE POET who wrote these lines was clearly at some envious distances from his subject and may have imagined a happiness which was not there. He would have few disciples today. To be content with one's lot has become unfashionable among all shades of opinion. For the modern virtues words such as "profitability" and "productivity" have had to be coined.
Whatever promotes these is acceptable. The saying that comparisons are odious is not extended to inter-firm comparisons. The Road Transport Industry Training Board runs no risk of making itself unpopular when, as happened the other day, it rebukes many small operators for showing a distinct lack of interest in growth or even in increased profits. Hauliers ought not to be like this.
The Board intends to cure them by means of the TASC scheme—the initials stand for Training Assistance in Small Companies. As the Board's chairman, Mr. K. C. Turner, has pointed out the aim is to change "anti-minded people into trainingminded people receptive to our ideas".
Brain washing
In spite of the brain-washing imagery the basic idea is an essential development of the Board's work. Only 15 per cent of the firms in the road transport industry are at present undertaking training of any kind. The plausible explanation lies in the very large number of small undertakings where often one man is owner, salesman, accountant and personnel manager, as well as being the technical expert, the buyer and the storesman.
He cannot spare the time to go away on a training course. The aim of the Board is to bring the training to him. When the new scheme is in full operation the Board's regional training officers will be giving onthe-job demonstrations to the small operator to prove the value and relevance of manage' ment techniques.
Before this happens there are to be one small and one larger pilot surveys. The purposes will be to diagnose management training needs; to persuade managers that they have these needs; and to devise ways of filling the needs.
It may seem an odd therapy to plan treatment so confidently on a diagnosis that has not so far been made. It has been known for doctors to find their pet malady in every patient who comes under their scrutiny. Much in the same way the Board may be too much inclined to believe that because an operator has no facilities for training he is bound to be inefficient.
Evidently many of the operators approached by the Board have poured scorn on certain sacred concepts. This seems deplorable but the culprit may know what he is about. He has perhaps run a small fleet of vehicles for several years to the great satisfaction of his customers. He has looked after the vehicles properly and he has made enough money for his own needs. This represents his measure of in dependence and it may be the limit of his ambition.
He succeeds in a modest way because he understands everything that is happening. He may oppose the introduction of sophisticated techniques, not because he truly despises them but because the academic approach is alien to him. He has no wish to introduce into his business something that he cannot easily understand. His instinct after all may be sound.
The Board would do well not to get out of temper with hauliers nor to assume too lofty an air of superiority. The industry has perhaps endured too much from politicians, civil servants, economists and other experts of all kinds as well as official and unofficial bodies.
The various reports on road haulage charges and productivity by the Prices and Incomes Board read like a single, long querulous monologue. Half the road transport legislation introduced since the war seems to have been designed to prevent operators from doing one thing or another. Their misdeeds and shortcomings are the subject of periodical rebuke by the Ministry of Transport. The Training Board itself was the product of the opinion that operators badly needed training and were incapable of providing it by their own efforts.
Not that the critics are uniformly successful in their own affairs. The Commons Estimates Committee in a report last week had some adverse comments to make about the poor return so far on the greatly increased expenditure by the Ministry in particular on vehicle testing and plating.
Complex provisions
It was wrong, said the Committee, for the Ministry to include in a statutory scheme complex provisions for the testing of different classes of vehicles before defined dates if they had no intention or ability to enforce those provisions. Only 7,000 vehicles registered before 1958 had been tested out of an estimated 17,000 and there was no immediate prospect of detecting the 10,000 "potentially unsafe vehicles".
Blame for the situation is laid by the Ministry on the present overload of work on local taxation authorities. The Ministry is not therefore insisting on the production of a test certificate when a vehicle needs to be re-licensed. It is not thought feasible for taxation officers to know at any particular moment which classes of vehicle should have been submitted for testing. For the same reason the police have not been asked to check on vehicles which may be evading the regulations.
Simplify it
Evidently the excuses do not satisfy the Committee. The report recommends "that the Ministry should consider how the phasing of the scheme might be simplified sufficiently to make it practicable at an early date to demand a test certificate as a condition of re-licensing, and whether overall responsibility for the safety and testing of heavy goods vehicles might not be more effectively unified".
From all this the small operator might be tempted to suggest that the services of the management experts of the Board could be more usefully employed in the Ministry than at his depot. He will need a good deal of persuasion, not so much that people from outside the industry can teach him anything he does not already know as that the new knowledge will be of practical use in his particular business.
If he is no longer young he may remember the events of 20 years ago. The 1947 Transport Act was intended to produce a new transport heaven and earth. Experts were called in from all quarters to run the new nationalized bodies that were set up. The results cannot be said to have justified the efforts. To judge from the storm of abuse which shortly broke out the road haulage organization in particular lamentably failed to meet the requirements of trade and industry.
Now outlook
Fortunately, men with knowledge and experience were in due course able to take over. The wheel may not have turned full circle but evidence of a new outlook is plain when we find Sir Reginald Wilson, chairman of the new National Freight Corporation, suggesting that the expert is very well in his place but that is where he should be kept.
Revolutionary doctrines are in the air. University students are beginning to question the whole basis of the type of education offered to them. Operators are at least entitled to have the same reaction.
Possibly they have a stronger right. It has been pointed out that most students are being kept by the State—or as some people prefer to have it by the taxpayer—so that if they do not like what the State offers them they should hand back their grants and go somewhere else.
The operator is financing the Board himself by means of a levy. He is certainly justified, if he would only take the trouble, in working out his own training needs and demanding, through his representatives on the Board, that they should be met. Perhaps the Board should be at more pains to find out what the customer really wants instead of telling him what he ought to want.