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WRITES
‘Common Market transport may be very different from what is at present envisaged'
ARRANGEMENTS recently concluded for regular contact between representatives of Great Britain and of the European Economic Community show that the possibility that one day Britain will become a member has not been abandoned. The wisdom has been proved of similar consultation at different levels of the Community. Transport must obviously have a key rote, and it is reassuring that M. Robert Goergen, a member of the transport department of the E.E.C. Commission, who outlined the transport proposals to British operators a year ago, when entry to the Common Market seemed probable, has again visited this country in order to give an account of later developments.
He is a welcome visitor, and operators must hope that he will continue to keep them up to date. The procedure so far adopted for reorganizing transport within the Common Market is complicated and at many points apparently contradictory. When M. Goergen and other experts speak, they are almost bound, to leave the impression that a cumbersome bureaucratic machine is being set up and that operators will find themselves restricted even more tightly than they are at present. Only as the story unfolds will it become clear whether this pessimistic assessment is correct or whether the machine can be progressively dismantled.
What happens to the Community Quota system will provide as good a test as any. At present, road haulage between members of the Community is governed by bilateral, or in some cases multilateral, agreements. The intention is in due course to replace these miscellaneous arrangements with a general agreement. By this means it is hoped to have permanent control of transport capacity and a more efficient use of vehicles, to give equal rights to carriers in all the countries, to provide a fair division of labour and to develop road haulage in accordance with its potentialities and the needs of the Common Market.
The present time schedule provides for the introduction of the first Community quota at the beginning of 1964_ For that year and the next, the quota will be for 750 licences covering the same number a vehicles. The exact percentage has been worked out for each of the six countries: 25 per cent each for France and West Germany, 19 per cent for the Netherlands, 15 per cent for Italy, 13 per cent for Belgium and 3 per cent for Luxembourg. The holder of a licence may use any vehicle he pleases; it will be allowed to cross all frontiers and to ply for hire or reward anywhere within the Community.
A SHARE FOR EACH
Already, according to some reports, there is bickering among Continental operators, all of whom naturally enough would like to gain possession of what seems to be the roost desirable of all road haulage licences. It must have been very much what operators dreamed of before the licensing system was introduced in Britain, and in some respects what many of them may have imagined they had before the declaration of normal user took on its present significance. Even the licensing study group of the Road Haulage Association is not advocating such complete freedom for the A licence, for reasons which may be equally valid in the Common Market.
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For ordinary purposes, each country is likely to retail some form of licensing for the carriage of goods withii its own boundaries, Operators seeking licences will rt, doubt be expected to give some indication of the woe they propose to do, and will also be expected to kee within whatever restrictions their licence imposes upo them. They will not be pleased if a foreign operator wh. has brought goods into their country is permitted to corn pete with them, as is at least possible if his licence i unconditional. There will be protests and an attempt t shackle the international haulier.
At the same time, more and more operators will b piessing for an international licence. The trader carryin his own goods will not need one, and this will apply als to the type of operation covered in Britain by the C hirin. or Contract A licence. To deny a licence to a hauliei but to permit the trader to carry the goods in his owl vehicle, which will almost certainly return empty, hardl; seems to promote " a more efficient use of vehicles ", s that there will be strong arguments in favour of increasin the quota if the demand is sufficiently strong. Since eacl year's quota will be fixed in advance, there will almo. inevitably have to be adjustments whenever the actua demand exceeds what was envisaged. .
Presumably, an operator who holds a licence has a strota case for its renewal. The number of licences may increas rapidly, perhaps to the point where they will no longer b needed. This could well be the ultimate intention of th common transport policy adumbrated in the Treaty a Rome. Healthy competition in transport is one of th principles guiding the Commission. But will they be abl to provide the circumstances in which competition cal flourish? Doubts are already being cast on this, notably b Mrs. Sylvia Trench in the PEP broadsheet to which referred last week, and which was summarized eIsewher in the journal.
Mrs. Trench pays particular attention to another part o the picture, the proposed forked tariff, with maximum an minimum rates to which operators will have to conforrr This instrument of policy ",in particular is not fore shadowed in any way in the Rome Treaty ", says Mr Trench, and argues persuasively that fixed rates are th negation of free competition. In any case, as far as cal be seen at present, there will have to be so many excep tions and special cases that the forked tariff may be founi of little or no use.
Its compilation is only one of several processes whic will presumably be put in train now that they have had th general approval of the Council of Ministers. The Corn munity quota is another item, and there must also be actioi towards harmonizing the laws governing competitio: between road, rail and inland waterways, determinin infrastructure costs and standardizing the internatione licensing procedure. These activities are to proceed simul taneously, and are bound to affect each other, apart friar the wide differences of opinion among the Six on man important details. The Common Market transport syster may in the end be very different from what is at presen envisaged,