Further delay on Labour's 'Grand Plan'?
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FROM OUR POLITICAL CORRESPONDENT T ABOUR'S national transport plan, so Li long awaited and so often predicted, may not be ready for another 12 months. It now seems clear that Mrs. Barbara Castle's White Paper, due out in the next four weeks or so, is likely to concentrate on the National Freight Authority and the Government's ideas for bucking up the railways' finances.
There will be enough in this paper to keep transport on the boil for a while, but a further postponement of the grand plan shows that Labour is having a big rethink following the blunt advice given by civil servants, temporary and otherwise, who have looked at their ideas since 1964.
The National Freight Corporation, to be set up at the turn of 1967-8, will control goods carried by State-controlled lorries, railways, canals and docks. The container system will figure prominently in its plans. If a customer consigns his goods by this system, the Corporation is likely to decide. how they will travel, with guaranteed speed of delivery being the criterion of the service.
This is where, it is hoped, the State will compete more effectively with the private road sector. With a tight system of collection points and liner trains and up-to-date containers, Mrs. Castle hopes that the big, long-haul consignments will fall more naturally into the railways' orbit.
The rail closure momentum will be slowed down, a new State freight charge structure will be introduced and the necessary capital will be made available—in fact, yet one more attempt will be made to make the railways work as a paying enterprise instead of a chronic drain on the taxpayers' cash.
Private hauliers are likely to have full access to liner trains under the plan, which (the Government will say) will inject healthy competition and social realism into an unbalanced industry.
There is also a suggestion that short-haul goods trains will virtually disappear, and that the gap will be filled by the railways' road vehicles, which will be freed to carry goods which are not due to spend part of their journey on the rails.
This, if introduced, would form a controversial element in the system. But it would be in keeping with Mr. Wilson's avowed aim of "taking the lid off' State industries by removing from them the shackles to competition imposed by previous Acts of Parliament.