Political Commentary
Page 67
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Natural Law
BY JANUS
CRACKS that may appear from time to time in the road haulage licensing system never become so deep
that they threaten the safety of the fabric. The people most directly concerned approve of the system in general, although they express dissatisfaction with some features. Neither within nor outside the transport industry is the idea ever put forward of having a radically, different system, although there is a spasmodic demand for the total abolition of licensing. This comes mainly from within the Liberal Party, and is inspired by the theory that the world -would be a better place if everybody were free to do exactly as he liked. , . The opinion outside the Liberal Party, and perhaps to a large extent inside it, is that some restrictions are desirable, including a curb upon the right to carry goods for other people by road. There is also an almost unanimous assumption that the best way to apply the restriction is through something very much like the present system of licensing.
Complaints about details, in fact,are often that they are anomalies or excrescences disturbing the -surface of the system. Independent hauliers objected when, in the early days of nationalization, British• Road Services were not required to hold licences. There was little practical purpose in the objection. So far from pUtting ,a large number of new vehicles on the road, B.R.S. cut down their fleet. When they were ultimately brought within the licensing system by the Transport Act, 1953, they were operating several thousand vehicles fewer than they had acquired. The need to have licences has proved no great disadvantage to them. Nevertheless, hauliers warmly approved the clause bringing B.R.S. within the jurisdiction of the traffic ,courts. It removed an anomaly, even if it had little practical effect.
Privilege Abused
More noticeable results would follow another reform pursued with no success at all by hauliers in agricultural areas. They would like farmers to be deprived of the right to carry goods for other farmers in their own Ci-licence vehicles. The hauliers do not care or dare to put their demand so bluntly. They prefer to complain of the widespread abuse of the privilege, either by farmers or by people pretending to be farmers. Whatever the approach, the privilege must be regarded as an anomaly in the present licensing system, and hauliers would be less than human if they did not grumble about it.
Other complaints may be concerned merely with administration. It is occasionally said that different Licensing Authorities take different views of the law, especially when an apparently new point arises, as with the bridging of the gap between the expiry of a special A licence and the grant of an ordinary A licence for which application has previously been made. Over a number of other points the danger has arisen in at least one traffic area of open conflict between the Licensing Authority and the representatives of operators.
There remain more fundamental grievances, which seem always to end in contradictions. At one point there appear _to be far too many vehicles for the available traffic; on another occasion the traffic is there in abundance but the vehicles are wilfully starved of it. The Labour Party attribute the surplus of vehicles to denationalization and to the lifting of the 25-mile limit. There may be something in the point, but it is ndt a complete explanation. With a few differences, the 1953 Act restored the position to what it was in 1947, when national production was lower and there were presumably fewer goods to be carried.
Conscious of the paradox, but equally conscious of the fact that traffic at a proper rate is increasingly hard to get, hauliers look for the villain and find him in the clearing house. One of the few really structural alterations in the law that they persistently canvass is the licensing of clearing houses, although nobody is clear how this can be done. What contributes to the present annoyance of hauliers is that, whereas the unlicensed clearing house is free to alight on whatever traffic it may covet, they must themselves pick and choose with care in case they go too far beyond their declaration of normal user.
Radical Alternative With so much confusion, it is odd that the licensing system itself is so rarely called into question. Possibly it has •become so familiar that no other way of regulating road haulage seems possible. The Salter committee, and Parliament through the Road and Rail Traffic Act, 1933, might easily, however, have constructed a completely different system. A quarter of a century ago, the emphasis was on restricting road transport in order that the railways might continue in the state of life to which they had become accustomed. A radical alternative would have been to give the railways complete freedom and impose a comparatively mild check upon the growth of road haulage.
Apart from changes in the status of the railways, there are almost infinite variations in the conditions that could have been attached to A and B licences. They could have been granted for specified routes; they could have allowed the holder to operate as many vehicles as he liked; he could have had the right to sell a licence or part of it, and been relieved of the responsibility of periodical renewal. If some or all of these ideas had been adopted, the road haulage industry would be very different from what it is now.
For one thing, there would be far more large businesses. In recent discussions coloured by the coming political conflict, stress has been laid on the virtues of the small man who has built up his business steadily but slowly, unladen ton by ton. He is honoured as a specialist, with an intimate knowledge of a small range of traffics and of the needs of a small number of customers. The description is no less accurate because the situation has grown without conscious planning. It is unlikely that the Salter committee and the Parliament of 1933 realized they were making it difficult for the large road haulage undertaking to come into existence. Had they realized it, they might have advised and legislated with a view to eliminating the difficulty, and they may well have been wrong to do so.
That they were right by accident in one particular shows that in other ways they could have been mistaken. The licensing system is a piece of human frailty and not a natural law. What it scarcely begins to tackle is the problem of the return load, perhaps because the problem hardly seemed a serious one to the pioneers of 1931 It is because hauliers can be tempted to take traffic back home at a low rate that the evils of price-cutting are being felt and that the unscrupulous clearing house is thriving. But on the subject of the return load the complicated law of licensing is silent.