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Quick move at top job

17th March 1984, Page 24
17th March 1984
Page 24
Page 24, 17th March 1984 — Quick move at top job
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Garry Turvey talks to Alan Millar

IT WAS AS NATURAL as Tuesday following Monday that Garry Turvey should succeed Hugh Featherstone next month as director-general of the Freight Transport Association. Their partnership as number two and number one administrators stretches back 24 years to when Turvey joined Featherstone as assistant secretary of the Traders Road Transport Association, the acorn from which today's highly successful FTA grew in 1969.

Not only was the succession a natural one, but it also must go down as one of the smoothest in the business. All speculation was snuffed out by announcing the change over a year ago, and Castleford, Yorkshire-born Turvey has been in effective command of an overhauled FTA organisation since January 1, ready for Featherstone's retirement on March 31.

The director-general designate has nothing but the utmost admiration for his predecessor, whose leadership has helped play a strong part in making the FTA one of the nation's more effective trade associations, but he is equally convinced that the unconventional management structure, in which the director-general and his deputy were superimposed over 16 line managers, had to go.

It was because of this that the deputy director-general's position was abolished and replaced by five functional directors who, with the five FTA regions, report direct to Turvey.

Opportunity has also been taken to restructure the FTA's grass roots, with a simpler national committee structure having been designed to reduce the areas of overlap between the existing committees. From May 1, when annual elections of members take place, there will only be two national committees reporting to the national council, the 60-member "parliament" of the Association.

The operations committee will consider matters relating to the running of transport, while the commercial area will handle the use of inland (and some international) freight transport. Each will have power to form ad hoc sub-committees to investigate and discuss specific matters as they arise, using experience gained recently when an ad hoc committee was established to consider the implications of the Government's Streamlining the Cities plan for the abolition of the Greater London Council and the metropolitan counties.

According to Turvey, this means the committees can be more flexible and reactive when necessary, and the old regime in which established committees met, say, on March 5 because it was arranged they would is a thing of the past. He envisages sub-committees being set up to look at such matters as a revival of the national fork lift truck drivers' training and certification scheme, should that happen.

Divisional committees, which operate in each of the five regions, will remain unchanged, and the British Shippers' Council, which the FTA absorbed in 1979, remains autonomous, with a right to elect one of the 12 members of the board, the "inner cabinet" responsible for policy. Until now, there were only 10 members of the board.

It means that the BSC, which had an unhappy period of being so integrated into the FTA system that its voice became swamped by the 90 per cent road transport domination of its activities, will have a chance of providing a future president of the FTA.

Unlike the Road Haulage Association, which is still domi nated by proprietors of family businesses, the FTA's membership comes increasingly from more mobile managers; hence FTA presidents' emergence from board membership in the months leading to their election every other May, rather than the RHA system in which a vicechairman elected this year knows he can be national chairman six years later.

That mobility of management, and a trend over the last four years of companies demanding that their executives spend more time with their businesses than with trade associations, is making it more difficult for members to spare time to work for trade associations like the FTA.

Turvey has already experienced problems getting shipping members to find time to attend important international negotiations, and while he appreciates why this happens, he told me: "I think this slide has gone as far as it can."

It also means that FTA members delegate more authority to permanent staff than other trade associations might, but Turvey believes the members have benefited from this. He and his staff are still answerable to the membership, which is not afraid to question policy. Democracy may have suffered slightly in the process, he admits, but adds: "I do not apologise for it. It is an absolutely super system."

The combination of membership services and political lobbying that has been the FTA's hallmark is one that Turvey sees developing in the future. Much of his FTA/TRTA career has been as financial manager, and he appreciates the vital role that services have in generating four fifths of the FTA's gross income.

Where demand is apparent, they will be developed, and Turvey points to the recruitment of extra staff to handle the new business flowing into the Freightcheck tachograph service. Training courses are ever popular, and plans to help members with the operator licensing changes in June are to be announced before long.

Turvey believes strongly in the need for different lobbying coming in cycles. And he believes that from the cycle of environmental concern, the industry is being projected into an era of road safety awareness. It happened in the sixties, he recalls, when a lorry with defective brakes killed an entire family on a picnic outing and the relentless progression towards annual heavy goods vehicle tests was set in train.

The spray supression regulations just issued in draft form is but the beginning of a sea change which Turvey detects. He believes the number of reported incidents of inadequate maintenance — not just when treated with such sensation on last month's Brass Tacks television programme, but soberly in trade journals like CM — means there is room for improvement and the FTA must accept that proposals for new legislation will be put forward.

He is also looking afresh at the FTA's outlook on the EEC, and while he predicts it will continue to play a full part in European affairs, he is conscious of the need to make sensible use of his staff's resources.

"I do think we must be far more critical of the time spent in Europe. Only last week [late February] very valuable staff time was wasted because of lengthy filibustering by other EEC members."

In future, it will be a question of trying to pack the right punch in discussions without wasting valuable time, and it is with such realism that he is looking at lorry weights for the future.

EEC weights harmonisation will not come soon, he is certain, but he believes Britain should aim for a 40-tonne limit over the next five to 10 years. "We are not saying we want a 1984/85 change to 40 tonnes. That would be unrealistic."

Garry Turvey recalls that the first job he ever took home from the three-man TRTA office in 1960 was its bank reconciliation. It is rather weightier and more worldly matters that he carries back to his Sussex home now that he heads the permanent staff of this 14,000-member trade association that is a business in itself. And it is no easy task, for he insists the power of the road lobby is over-rated by its opponents.


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