Hauliers' Remarkable Achievement
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THE road haulage industry could hardly fail to be shown up in a good light when the true facts and figures arc made known about the work done by road transport operators, said Mr. D. 0. Good, national chairman of the Road Haulage Association, at the annual dinner of the Association's Eastern Area on Friday.
The Ministry of Transport had just published the results of a survey of road goods transport made in the course of one week in April of last year. The Ministry calculations showed that there were 674 million ton-miles covered by road during that week, and of this total exactly one half was run by public haulage vehicles operating under A licence, contract A licence and B licence, "This is a remarkable achievement when one remembers that there are less than 200,000 road haulage vehicles185,000 to be precise, whereas there are nearly III million vehicles operating under C licence ", said Mr. Good.
Concentrating on the figures for vehicles on A licence, he said there were only 90,000 such vehicles, about 6 per cent of all the vans and lorries in the country. but they covered no less than 200 million ton-miles during the week when information was collected by the Ministry of Transport. Therefore, some 30 per cent of all the traffic was carried by 6 per cent of the vehicles.
Mr. Good went on: "I have singled out the A licence category because this includes practically all of the vehicles that are threatened by the Labour party with renationalization. In so far as tonmiles are a measure of transport efficiency, I venture to say that no more efficient transport machine has yet been devised than the A-licensed vehicles operated by our members. " If the Socialists believe that by taking over the vehicles they will automatically take over the traffic, they are in for a sad disillusionment. And this is something of which they, of all people, should be fully conscious. They ought to remember what happened last time in the years between 1947 and 1951 when they took over all the long distance vehicles they could lay their hands on only to find that much of the traffic slipped through their fingers and was, in fact, transferred by the traders to their own vehicles.
"Although the spokesmen of the Labour party keep talking about renationalization of road haulage, cannot think they are really so foolish he said.