AT THE HEART OF THE ROAD TRANSPORT INDUSTRY.

Call our Sales Team on 0208 912 2120

Ought our carriers' licensing system to BY FRANK be simplified for Continental carriers? BURRAVOE

11th January 1963
Page 55
Page 55, 11th January 1963 — Ought our carriers' licensing system to BY FRANK be simplified for Continental carriers? BURRAVOE
Close
Noticed an error?
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.

Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

LATITUDE IN LICENSING

WHAT ought we to do about our Continental confreres who will soon be coming to this country in greater numbers and with greater frequency? Would it be discourteous (and short-sighted) to put down for them not the red carpet of welcome, but a

barrage of licensing red tape? . Many of the visitors will not be unacquainted with the intricacies of licensing. Road haulage in some, if not all, of the Common Market countries is at least as manacled as it is here. Longdistance hauliers in Germany, for example, might well be prepared to shoulder the yoke of British goods vehicle licensing if only they could shed the millstone of their own.

Nevertheless, there is no point in saddling Continental hauliers who .want to convey loads to and from Britain with a licensing system which is unnecessarily complicated, slow and restrictive. In fact. the simpler the system which we fasten upon them, the stronger will be our case for easy entry of our vehicles into Europe. Concessions may well beget concessions.

It is known that the Ministry of Transport is considering what modifications of our carriers' licensing procedures are necessary for Continental hauliers. The division of licences into their present three compartments, A, B and C, ought not to create confusion. The equivalent of our C licence, in the guise of transport "on own account", as the Continentals put it, is already well known abroad. So, too, is its corollary, transport for hire or reward. The hybrid, the B licence, is a natural offspring of the marriage of the other two categories.

What is needed for a start is a decision on two main features. The first concerns venue. For Aand B-licence applications, our existing legislation requires a haulier to apply for his licence in the traffic area in which his operating centre, his base, is situated; and for C licences, in the traffic area in which his registered office is to be found. Can this system be made to apply to foreign vehicle owners? Not without considerable amendment surely, even if incoming operations are arranged through agencies domiciled here.

A possible modification would be to require applications to be made in the traffic area of the port of entry. Another more radical alternative might be to lift the licensing of foreign vehicles (and possibly of home vehicles journeying abroad) out of the control of the existing traffic areas and to give it to a separate and central licensing authority. Such an arrangement would have many advantages. It would be simpler and speedier for applicants; help towards the formulation of a common policy in what promises to be a tricky field of licensing; enable the overall operations to be better assessed and controlled; and ease problems of publication and determination.

The second feature is simplification of procedure for both long-term and shortterm licences for international haulage. Our present law provides the machinery for issuing two kinds of short-term licences. Section 169 of the Road Traffic Act allows licensing authorities to issue licences for a shortened currency period "in order to arrange a suitable and convenient programme of work "—an administrative short-term licence, as it were. Section 170 provides for the issuing of ordinary short-term licences (for a period not exceeding three months) to enable goods vehicles to be "used temporarily (a) for the purposes of a seasonal business, (b) for the purposes of the execution of a particular piece of work or (c) for any other purpose of limited duration ". Applications for these licences need not be published or heard at a Public Inquiry. • (The corresponding legislation for buses and coaches cuts out publication and the statutory time lag, but requires the applicant to show, in writing, why he could not foresee the need for the service and consequently was unable to make the application in time to allow compliance with the regulations.) Can a leaf be taken out of these books for international goods vehicle operations, inward and outward, short term and long term?

German Application

We might take a look at what happened recently in the case of the application for a B licence, made in the Metropolitan Traffic Area by Internationale Mobeltransport und Spedition, of Frankfurt am Main, to allow them to carry, about 12 times a year, "single loads of household removals picked up on the Continent (usually in Germany) for delivery in Great Britain, on the same vehicle which picked up the load to single destination in Great Britain for unloading and packing and placing in position in residence under the supervision of the same staff who packed the load on the Continent ".

The reason why the above application was made in the Metropolitan Traffic Area was presumably because the declared operating base was cio R.L. and Co, Transport Ltd., Gt. Windmill Street, London, W.I. not because the vehicles were intended to enter through the Port of London. On the face of it, an A licence would seem to have been equally or more appropriate, but for easily understandable reasons, the applicant chose to apply for a B licence. A short-term licence, under Section 170 would have been inappropriate. The application attracted roughly a score of objectors, including B.T.C. Imagination boggles at the number of objectors there might have been if the application had been published not only in the Metropolitan Area, but also in all the other traffic areas equally affected (following the comments of the Transport Tribunal in the appeal case of B.T.C. v. King in June, 1961).

If the German application had been

lodged with a separate and centralized licensing authority, instead of in the geographically circumscribed Metropolitan Area, publication would probably have been more effective, because it would be to that separate and specialist licensing authority that hauliers who were interested in international operations would look for notification of the receipt of such applications. But is publication really necessary or, indeed, appropriate in such cases? Organizations of operators have no locus as objectors in our traffic courts. An objector must be "already providing facilities, whether by means of road transport or any other kind of transport, for the carriage of goods for hire or reward in the district, or between the places, which the applicant intends to serve ". Unless, therefore, an association of operators acquired a haulage business, it would not come within the abovequoted definition. (The acquisition need be of only one vehicle, preferably an A vehicle, with a normal user of "General goods, Gt. Britain "!)

But, if special licensing machinery is to be devised for Continental traffic, it need not slavishly follow the lines of internal licensing. For example, rights of objecttion could give place to opportunity for making representations; representation might be accorded, not to providers of transport, but to transport associations such as the Road Haulage Association, the Traders Road Transport Association, the National Association of Furniture Warehousemen and Removers, the National Conference of Clearing Houses, etc.; notification to these bodies could supplant publication; public hearings need not be compulsory except, perhaps, at the licensing authority's discretion or when consultation makes it clear that some important point of general principle calls for public airing; and time limits for the various steps in procedure could be shortened.

Experiments on these lines might serve an unexpected purpose. They might reveal ways by which our old familiar licensing system for internal transport could be improved and streamlined.

After all, 1963 is its thirtieth birthday, and it has not had a real change of clothes in all that time.


comments powered by Disqus