Unholy Alliance
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Uncompromising Critics of a Bill that Contains Much Good Strengthen the Hand of its Parliamentary Opponents : The Government's Proposals Must be Accepted as a Whole or Not At All
SO far, much criticism of the Transport Bill and the White Paper has been factional. The still small voice of the impartial objector has been drowned by the stentorian protests of interests that feel for many different reasons that they have a grievance. The long delay before the Second Reading may give an opportunity for a more careful examination of the Government's plan on its own merits and not according to whether it suits the requirements of the individual critic.
The proposals for road passenger transport have, on the whole, esCaped vigorous objections. One can appreciate the reason. The Road Passenger Executive was never much more than a wraith, and when it is quietly laid to rest on September 30, scarcely anybody will notice the difference. If it be honest with itself, the Commission must be glad to escape from the responsibility of promoting area passenger schemes.
In London the Commission will revert to the same position as the London Passenger Transport Board before nationalization. Outside London it will lose the power of acquiring passenger undertakings, and may in some cases be required to shed its controlling interest in bus companies. What the Government has in mind is to prevent or disperse a Commission monopoly in any part of the country. Further light on this point will no doubt be shed by the official review which will be made of the working of the licensing system for passenger transport. '
On the whole, these measures have wide approval and represent a muted triumph for organizations such as the Passenger Vehicle Operators' Association. In fact, if there be any objections at all, they are most likely to come from passenger operators who think the Government has not gone far enough in breaking the Commission's grip on the industry. On the road haulage side, the dispute is far noisier and arises, or so it seems, from nearly every quarter.
Compromise
To some extent the Bill, like every Bill; is a compromise between what the Government considers the ideal and what is felt to be politically possible and desirable. Where so many basic principles and assumptions are involved, there can be no exact enumeration of the Government's aims, but one may argue reasonably that certain points would be included on any count.
The Bill begins with a clear statement that its main purpose is to provide first of all for the disposal of the British Transport Commission's road haulage property. The reasons are set out plainly, even brutally, in the White Paper. The Bill concentrates on the methods. The Commission, working in conjunction with a Road Haulage Disposal Board, must divide the Road Haulage Executive into transport units. These are to be "operable," says the White Paper. The Bill interprets this by stating that the "conditions of the purchase shall be such as. in the opinion of the Commission, are calculated to enable a purchaser to engage without delay in the carriage of goods by road for hire or reward."
a20 Except by special arrangement with the Minister of Transport, no unit will include more than 50 vehicles. _Units will presumably be sold, in most cases, to the highest bidder, but the precise requirement in the Bill is that the parcelling up of the units shall be carried out with an eye to getting the "best possible price" for the transaction as a whole.
A licences, not subjedt to the 25-mile limit, will be granted for a five-year period to purchasers, and will be required for the vehicles that the Commission will be allowed to retain. These will roughly be equivalent to the number operated or controlled by the railways before nationalization. Any vehicles or other property left over when the units have been disposed of will be sold as chattels without benefit of licence.
Relaxation
Another of the Government's clear aims is to give greater freedom to the Aand B-licence holder. The 25-mile limit will be lifted on an appointed day, which will approximately coincide with the date when the main business of selling transport units has ended. Subsequent entrance into the privileged community of Aand Blicence holders will be widened. The objector, and not the applicant, will in future have to bear the notorious onus of proof. The Licensing Authority will have a much greater discretion than at present. He will have regard to the relative efficiency, reliability and adequacy of the existing and proposed facilities, and must look into the question of charges.
It needs no great knowledge of mathematics to realize that Aand B-licence holders, once they are given wider scope, will take a greater share of the available traffic; and they must take it either from the railways or from the C-licence holders. The Government is not anxious to subsidize the railways or the Commission, but it does not wish the Commission, as a result of the Bill, to have less chance of making both ends meet. At the same time, although not expressly stated, it is fairly safe to say that another of the Government's aims is to keep the C-licence holder free from restriction.
What can be done in these circumstances? The Government's solution is the levy on all goods vehicles with an unladen weight of one ton or more. At 13s, 6d. for each quarter-ton of unladen weight, the cost will be borne by the operators of approximatelY 560,000 vehicles and will realize £4m. in the first year. Payments from the Transport Fund thus provided will be made to the Commission to offset losses resulting from the sale of R.H.E. assets and to compensate for the abstraction of traffic by the new hauliers introduced through the more generous licensing system.
The levy is intended to promote another of the Government's aims by countering some of the more likely attacks from the opponents of denationalization. One of their persistent allegations is that the Tories are disposing of the " more profitable" section of the Commission at a low price as an indirect present to the road haulage industry. The jibe loses much of its sting when it is known that the hauliers will have to contribute
their share towards making up the difference between what the Commission paid for the "R.H.E. and what it receives from the sale.
"Road haulage," the White Paper states, "has in the past been restricted largely in order to avoid excessive competition between road and rail. :This process has now gone so far as to deprive trade and industry of the full advantages of modern road transport and has driven traders to provide their own road transport to an extent which would not otherwise have occurred." If one accepts this premise and the related condemnation of the structure set up by the 1947 Transport Act, it is not difficult to understand what the Government is trying to do.
Denationalization First
Denationalization of road haulage must be the first step. Then comes release frorn the 25-mile limit and relaxation of the licensing stranglehold. The trader must be left free to run his own vehicles. Something must be done to cushion the Commission against the inevitable growth of its road transport competitor and the levy seems to provide the cheapest way out of the difficulty.
The Government's contention that the Transport Bill must be considered as a whole is not unreasonable.
Some of the details can be improved, but if any one of the main points be eliminated, the Bill might have to be
abandoned altogether. This fact is not yet sufficiently understood. Each critic concentrates on the point he particularly dislikes and .excludes the rest from his consideration.
As is only to be expected,.:ffie-Socialist opposition at least is hot guilty of this fault.. On principle it attacks
every part of the Bill, and the more extreme Socialists are already breathing fire and slaughter, strikes and renationalization. Their attitude is as easy to under stand as that of the Government. They do not accept the principles on which the Bill iS based and consequently to their eyes no part of it can be good. They are therefore probing every point in the hope of finding out the weak spots.
. Other critics, who may imagine they are being more selective, possibly fail to realise how useful they are as target-spotters for the Socialists. One school of thought, with adherents among hauliers as well as elsewhere, favours the abolition of the 25-mile limit, but is against denationalization and the levy. Ex-operators, this school maintains, have no wish to come back into the industry. The wide boys, the get-rich-quick city slickers with jingling pockets, are the people who will move in, buy units on the quick, clean up and get out before the next election. And the mugs who just want to run an honest and efficient haulage business will have to pay through the levy for the profits made by the interlopers.
Men of Goodwill Needed There is a possible danger that something like this will happen. The Bill cannot completely guard against it, It is the hauliers and men of goodwill generally who can prevent it by encouraging the right sort of person to come forward. Lurid prophecies of spivvery by kind permission of Parliament -play into the hands of the Socialists, and particularly of the union demagogues who are anxious to present to the workers in the worst possible light the kind of employer they may expect to have when the.R.H.E. is no more.
The levy has produced more criticism than anything else, This is not surprising, for when was a tax ever popular? What is a little sinister is that the Socialists are as loud as anybody else in their condemnation. One can understand their wishing the Commission to remain undisturbed and the haulier to be kept in his straitjacket. It is odd that they should object to the proposal to pay the Commission £4m. a year.
The Socialists regard the levy as the Trojan horse by means of which they will be able to smuggle themselves into the Tory stronghold and, they hope, ultimately destroy it. All the best arguments against the levy have come from organizations representing the trader, and in particular the C-licence holder. The British Road Federation has been especially forceful. It "will continue to resist this ill-conceived proposal" and can put forward strong reasons for doing so.
If the railways cannot stand on their own feet, says the Federation cogently, that is no reason for penalizing road vehicle operation. Motor taxation this year will bring in 040m., of which over 85 per cent. will be paid by commercial transport. By this standard the levy may not seem a great deal, but taxes, once they are imposed, have a habit of growing and are seldom, if ever, repealed.
The Federation has its foot in the wrong door. On the other side of the threshold awaits the unaccustomed welcome of Mr. Herbert Morrison. In opening the Opposition's attack on the White Paper some weeks agb, Mr. Morrison concurred with the points made in a document circulated to M.P.s by the Federation, and added a few of his own, not nearly so telling. The levy, he said, would subsidize the railways without encouraging efficiency, would penalize road transport and would be a flea-bite. Arguments to suit all tastes! . Perhaps the most dangerous of all the critics are the optimists who although they haVe no gteat affe.ction for the Act. of 1947, have become accustomed to it and would be content with things as they are. Such critics would have the approval of Mr. Morrison, but by no means that of the Labour Party as a whole. There is growing among the Opposition a feeling that nationalization as represented n the 1947 Act did not go nearly far enough.
Mr. Cecil Poole; M.P., has been saying this for a long time. The editors of " Tribune " have given him the opportunity of putting his views before the public through the medium of a pamphlet. As Movement Control Officer in the Royal Engineers during the war, Mr. Poole had experience of all forms of transport. Like Cromwell, he cannot understand why war-time methods should not be equally applicable in peace.
Mental Discipline It never occurs to the soldier to demand a lorry when he is detailed to go by train. So why should the trader make all this fuss about his freedom of choice? It is "ridiculous to imagine that the transport system can be economic if it is left to the consignor to select the method by which his goods shall move." It is also, declares Mr. Poole, all wrong, not to say untidy, that the trader should be able to put his own vehicles on the road without restriction. There should be a mileage limit for local delivery vans, and other C-licence holders should be required to prove need before the granting of a licence.
Denationalization of road haulage is the surest protection of the trader against such fantasies as Mr. Poole's. But denationalization means greater competition for the railways, and that means some form of compensation. However objectionable some of the provisions in the Bill may be, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Government has tried to deal with the transport problem as a whole and that its solution must be accepted as a whole, or not at all.