TOO LATE • There is only one thing wrong with
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your Comment "Permits" (Commercial Motor, December 20) — it is eight years too late.
Until 1978 all EEC permit increases were proportional. Then the Commission devised a scheme for relating each country's increase to the use its hauliers made of existing permits. This took no account of the fact that British tonnekilometres were reduced by the inevitable ferry crossing.
So out of an overall increase of 10% for 1979 we got only 8.8%. The difference then was only three permits, but the principle of relating increases to usage had been established, and the damage had been done. In 1987 that principle is costing us 168 permits*.
Since then the formula has been amended in a way which is supposed to take account of the sea crossing, but there is something fundamentally wrong with a formula which gives the permit-rich Netherlands a 35% increase — three times Britain's 12.9%.
You are wrong to blame the Eurocrats. True, they devised the formula, but Ministers did not have to accept it; however, successive British Transport Ministers have accepted it. When I was the responsible DTp offical one Minister rejected my advice to fight the formula on the grounds that "this is the council of Ministers, not an
oriental bazaar", The 1987 permit allocations show that few European Transport Ministers share that lofty sentiment, and while British Ministers continue to regard it as beneath them to haggle British hauliers will continue to lose out.
Reg Dawson West London *ln 1978 Britain had 11.5% of the total quota shared between the nine EEC members. In 1987 those nine share 8,078 permits; 1L5% of that is 928 — 168 more than Britain's 760.