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• According to Shropshire's chief trading standards officer, David Roberts,
Page 124
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hauliers should be paying much heavier licence duty than they are. Indeed, Roberts reckons that in terms of road damage costs, one 38-tonne lorry equals 35,000 cars, and he suggests that licence duty — £2,730 for a truck compared with .2100 for a car — should reflect this 'anomaly'.
That's not all. He thinks that hauliers who overload their vehicles do not deserve "highway facilities" for which the general public has to foot the bill, and he has included these sentiments in a report which he forwarded recently to the county's fire and public protection committee recently.
How he arrives at his conclusions, and how he proposes to exclude drivers who overload their vehicles from using, say, a motorway loo, he doesn't say; but it is generalities like this, passed on to the local press, that get this industry — and everyone involved in it — a bad name.
My thanks to the Shropshire haulier — who had better remain anonymous in case his path crosses with Mr Roberts — for sending me the cutting about this which appears in the Shropshire Star.