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50 Ye ars of

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18th March 1955

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Page 156, 18th March 1955 — 50 Ye ars of

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Pat ical Str ife

by C. S. Dunbar, M. Inst. T. WHEN The Commercial Motor was born, commercial motor vehicles were of so little importance that they hardly needed special legislation. Old laws going back to the stage-coach era, plus Acts controlling traction engines and the more recent Motor Car Act, 1903, taken in conjunction with local by-laws, were sufficient for public safety. It was under the 1903 Act that the Heavy Motor Car Order, 1904, was made and came into force in March, 1905, as the result of pressure from the youthful associations. Thenceforward, a maximum .unladen weight of 5 tons was allowed and the giddy speed of 12 m.p.h. was authorized.

Until the 1914-18 war, the only form of road transport which took up much Parliamentary time was the tram, and a great deal of public and private money was spent in securing powers for extensions. In a number of instances municipalities and companies sec ured clauses in their Acts which enabled them to run buses -as feeders to their trams. These clauses later proved most

useful. .

In 1917, the famous case of Weston-super-Mare Urban District Council v. Henry Butt began. The council claimeddamages from Butt for using a public road for alleged abnormal traffic. The Commercial Motor Users' Association spent £5,000 in fighting the case and then lost it after a five-year battle, but it emphasized the need for a new outlook on road construction and maintenance.

From 1919, the number of vehicles on the road rose rapidly and it became apparent to many railwaymen that their monopoly was seriously threatened. Some of the railways, as I have pointed out in another article [pages 243-244] were among the first to operate motor vehicles, both goods and passenger, but it 'seemed doubtful whether they really had powers to do so. An attempt to include general powers in the Railways Act. 1921, and another by the Midland and North-Western Railways in 1922, were defeated by the opposition of the road transport organizations, but the attack was renewed with much greater force in 1928 and this time was successful.

Threat to Carriers

The professional road carriers were faced with a serious threat. In the case of the bus section, the decision of the railways not to set up alternatives to the existing undertakings, but to take a financial interest in them, relieved the tension. The goods side was hardly organized and dissatisfaction with the old associations, which were either wholly local or catered mainly for ancillary users, led to the founding of the Long Distance Road Haulage Association.

It was unfortunate, to put it mildly, that in this formative decade of road transport the present Premier began the practice of raiding the Road Fund and so initiated the policy which has ever since relegated this important national service to the status of a mulch cow. It is difficult to understand how the associations have so failed to impress the seriousness of this fiscal policy on successive generations of politicians. The general trend of development moved the Government to set up a Royal Commission on Transport, which made three reports in 1929-30. The first recommended more control of road traffic in the interests of public safety and the second advocated a licensing system for public service vehicles. These reports formed the basis of the Road Traffic Act, 1930.

Whilst, on the whole, bus operators welcomed this Act, the municipalities, which ceased to be masters in their own areas, regarded it with scant approval and, in many cases, open hostility. The argument produced by the Royal Commission's first two reports was nothing compared with the rumpus which arose from the third.

This report, which dealt with co-ordination, contained the extraordinary suggestion that vehicles above 4 tons unladen weight should be discouraged from using the roads by .a steep increase in taxation above that weight. As againsf this blow it suggested that no form of licensing was necessary for goods transport beyond ensuring that vehicles were maintained efficiently and that proper wages were being paid.

The uproar caused by the report led the Minister of Transport to .appoint a committee under the chairmanship of Sir Arthur Salter to examine the position of road transport in relation to other transport interests, and particularly its financial obligations. The Salter Con fGrence (as it came to be called) was set up in a somewhat unusual manner, as the Minister called a meeting of certain interested parties and both the terms of reference and the membership of the Conference were decided at the meeting. The Road Haulage Association (as the L.D.R.H.A. had by then become) took exception to this and claimed that the associations whose nominees formed the conference had only a minority of hauliers in their membership.

Road Costs and Taxation

The Conference tried to ascertain how much of the increased cost of the roads since pre-motor days was caused by the growth of road transport and, having estimated this in terms of annual maintenance costs, suggested that new scales of taxation should be introduced to produce a revenue equivalent to these costs. The scales were calculated in such a way as to deter the operation of heavy vehicles.

Another proposal was that goods vehicles should be licensed by the Traffic Commissioners set up under the 1930 Act, who should have regard to the need for preventing an excess of facilities. It is odd to remember now that the Road Haulage, Association were violently opposed then to any licensing system for goods vehicles.

• In 1933 the Road and Rail Traffic Act was passed to carry out the licensing recommendations of the conference report and the fiscal suggestions were adopted in a new kale of taxation which had the effect (among others) of killing steam traction on the roads. An important difference between the 1933 and the 1930 Acts was in the establishment of a Tribunal to hear haulage appeals. As this body had statutory powers and early showed that it intended to build up a corpus of case law, many of the early battles in the .traffic courts have become classics which have largely fixed the pattern of road transport since.

Such cases as Bouts-Tillotson and Hawker spring to mind as having decided the grounds on which licences might be renewed, the number of vehicles increased or collection and delivery vehicles provided in connection with trunk working.

L.P.T.B. Formed

. In the same year as the Road and Rail Traffic Act was passed, a great change occurred in the Metropolitan Area, with the setting up of the almost independent London Passenger Transport Board to take over the Underground, the Metropolitan Railway and all passenger road services within a radius of about 30 miles of Charing Cross. When the 1914-18 war ended, the Underground group and the municipalities were the only road passenger operators in London and, had they been left alone, there is little doubt that some sort of pooling arrapgement would have emerged without loss of identities. This nearly happened in 1927.

The flood of independents which burst on the streets from 1922 onwards wreaked havoc with the finances of the established operators, especially those owning trams. It was essential at that time to preserve the trams, because (apart from the huge capital invested) they carried far more people than any other form of metropolitan transport and gave facilities which the buses did not. A strike of tramwaymen forced the issue and the upshot of this was the London Traffic Act, 1924.

This gave powers to the Minister of Transport to limit the number of buses plying on London streets and set up a system of route regulation by Scotland Yard. Although the Act saved the trams financially, it proved difficult to administer without throttling desirable development. Complete amalgamation appeared eventually to he the Only way to deal with the problem. Thomas Tilling and the independents put up a great fight for their existence, but it was of no avail,

The "Square Deal"

In 1938 the four main-line railways made their demand for a " Square Deal "—in other words, the right to alter their basis of charging to. enable them to quote competitively. The sweeping away of the statutory control of railway rates which had lasted for a century was seen as a great threat to road transport and it brought about a degree of unity between the associations which had never been achieved before—in fact, it may be said to have led to the present R.H.A. and National Road Transport Federation. A direct result of the negotiations between road and rail at this time was the establishment of the Road and Rail Central Conference, with regional committees. There was a mitigation of the war in the traffic courts and progress was made towards agreement on standard conditions of carriage. At that time the possibility of a road rate structure was seriously contemplated and much work was done' towards this end.

The war came in 1939 before any further major :flange could take place, but thoughtful minds had for some time been considering what could be done to give the goods side as great a measure of stability as the passenger interests had achieved. Towards the end of the war, eight of the leading personalities in the trade published a brochure entitled "The Road Carrying Industry arid the Future." Their major proposal was to encourage the formation cif larger units, which would be in a position to carry out agreements made with other forms of transport. The proposals of "the eight" were angrily rejected by the members of their associations, but it is at least a reasonable suggestion that had their proposals been adopted nationalization might either have been avoided or have taken a very different form.

As it was, the return of a Labour Government in 1945 made some form of co-ordination of the various transport agencies certain. C-licensees exercised sufficient pressure to escape the threatened limitation of their movements, but the professional carriers were completely out-manceuvred. The result was an Act which was unsatisfactory to all parties. It loaded the British Transport Commission with thousands of vehicles which by no stretch of imagination could be brought into any co-ordination scheme and unnecessarily circumscribed the activities or many remaining hauliers.

Threat to Bus Operators

On the passenger side, the case of Smith, of Buntingford, and the running of contract carriages by London Transport up to 100 miles' radius, threatened the whole of the industry outside State ownership.

Events since 1947 are too recent to need recapitulation in detail, but in my opinion the 1953 Act, in trying to denationalize a large section of British Road Services, is proving even more impracticable than the 1947 Act. The threat from London Transport no longer exists, but apart from this almost the only bright spot in the legal field in recent years has been the securing of more realistic dimensions and other concessions under the Construction and Use Regulations, 1951.

The ridiculous speed limit of 20 m.p.h. for heavy motorcars still remains, as does the restriction of fourwheeled double-deckers to 27 ft. It is high time the Minister took his courage in both hands and cut these Gordian knots.

On the passenger side, the ambiguities or contract hire, occasioned by the wording of the Road Traffic Acts. 1930 and 1934, have not yet been resolved; the suggestions of the Thesiger Committee which inquired into this matter, among others, met with a lukewarm reception and it remains to be seen whether the legislation which is now under consideration will produce better results.

Groaning Under Penal Taxation

The industry is still groaning under penal taxation. In the early years, only a small registration fee was charged, then came a tax of 3d. a gallon on petrol in 1909, avowedly to finance road improvements. With the change to an unladen-weight and seat basis of taxation under the Finance Act, 1920, the petrol tax was abolished. It was reimposed (at 4d. per gallon) in 1928 and. much to the indignation of road transport operators, was said to be for the purpose of financing the rating relief provisions of the Local Government Act, 1929—in other words, road transport was to be taxed to enable the railways and factory owners to be excused all or most of their rates.

In the meantime, diversion of the Road Fund for general purposes had already begun, and it might have been thought that road transport was already being hit hard enough. Successive governments have thought differently. Not only has the fuel tax been increased six times to the present fantastic level of 2s. 6d. per gallon, but in 1935 the tax on dery (previously only Id. per gallon) was brought into line with that on petrol. In addition, as already mentioned, the raised scales of taxation based on the Salter Report still further added to the industry's burden.