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Legacy of the past
DSTALGIA is certainly not an ingredient the sixth and last annual report of the ansport Holding Company. Sir Reginald ilson and his four other directors see the ief history of their organization as a period tinly of lost opportunities and of a struggle en to remain above the bread line.
A final chapter, belying its mellow Lanseer e of A Retrospect, ranges over the 21 years ice the commencement of the British ansport Commission with a barely conriled rage at the constant interference by ccessive Governments. Approximately 13 am out of the 21, says the report, were ent waiting for major Transport Acts of rliament, "whether good or not-so-good," din reorganizing after them.
Political, innocents such as hauliers ty be astonished at much of the THC verm of history. There has been a "steady in!ase down the years", says the report, in wemment interventions or controls. Only the beginning was there the freedom from erference originally intended when "the vice of the public corporation was adopted the Act of 1947 as a workable substitute r outright nationalization".
then the rot set in
Those operators who can get past the icription of the BTC as "workable" may 'rider what interventions or controls could ye been worse than the Transport Act 47. The next 10 years certainly seemed the )st repressive. But the report jumps over an and takes the story on to 1955-56.
It was apparently then that the rot set in. teed of financing itself by issuing Treasury:Iced loan stocks the BTC now had to borv small sums at frequent intervals from the msury through the medium of the Minister Transport. He was given "the decisive were of both a banker and a creditor".
Not long afterwards the BTC was involved deliberate deficit-financing. The Minister t only suggested restraint in an attempt to pp the inflationary spiral but over-ruled a bunal judgment which would have brought railways another £17m. a year from their il traffic.
.`Things were never the same again," the lort laments. The railways went rapidly wnhill financially. Because of this and -iderstandably" the scope and nature of werrunent interventions widened and were de ever more detailed. "It must be an open nti on," says the report, "how far the on)py position which justified this resort to a se control was itself the product, at least in -t, of what had happened earlier in the way formal legislation and informal interven terventions
More recently, says the report—and here operators are on familiar ground—there ye been the general interventions of the era the managed economy. It is suggested that empts at the detailed settlement of prices, or of wages and conditions, and at an integrated control of things from the centre, "are bound to bear more hardly and much closer on a public corporation than on private business". The THC consolidated profits of £90m. in six years would have been still greater with a greater degree of freedom to manage its own affairs. "Nor, it is thought, would the customers or the public interest have suffered."
From the present Government stateowned road transport, in its new avatar of National Freight Corporation, seems to expect little improvement in the harsh treatment meted out to all and sundry during the past two or three years. Following a change of Government the outlook seems even less promising. "At the time of writing," says the report, "it is confidently asserted that a different Government, if and when it comes to power, would probably upset a great part of the basis of the Act of last year.','
The chief evil, the report concludes, is the "all-too-frequent legislation with its wide swings of the pendulum". It not only causes grave policy and organizational upsets but also maintains "party politics at fever heat". This in turn keeps the public stirred up, thoroughly critical and unsatisfied and that exacerbates the demand for the Government to "do something". Such is the spiral.
Plea for stability
All this adds up to an eloquent plea for stability. It will be echoed by independent operators. Most of them would be prepared to settle for the situation left by the Transport Act 1968 with the proviso that the Government forget about quantity licensing. Hints that the Conservatives would split up the NFC and even return parts of it to free enterprise are no longer generally acceptable to hauliers.
Unfortunately this may not be enough to settle the issue. There is a sort of political determinism not sufficiently taken into account by the progressive and pragmatic men in the NFC. The past cannot be buried so easily.
Nearly all the ills of post-war transport spring from the 1947 Act. Its respectful treatment in the report cannot disguise the fact that it was a piece of monumental folly. It was based on the assumption—which should have been universally recognized as false even at the time that the railways were secure in their position as the dominant form of transport.
The absurdly grandiose structure of the BTC was built round them. British Road Services and the other "executives" were no more than humble satellites. The watchword was integration by decree and for a long time this meant despotic control by the railways.
In 1947 the road haulage industry had scarcely begun to recover. What according to the report is "misleadingly called" nationalization deprived the industry of fully half its leaders and reduced them for a time to little more than the impotent status of the French nobility at the court of the Sun King. Their businesses were swallowed up. Those hauliers who escaped the net were mostly small operators and they were cut down still more to size by a restriction in many cases to a radius of 25 miles from their operating centre.
Paying the penalty
After a lapse of 21 years it barely seems credible_ But the transport industry is still paying the penalty. The railways are still groping after their proper subordinate role and at the same time day-dreaming of a climb back to power by some political backstair route. A diminishing group of independent hauliers continues to think of stateowned transport as an obscenity. The NFC is caught between the two and must play the part allotted to it.
The main error was not nationalization or state control but the method chosen to bring this about. The doctrinaire Labour Government after the war had strong beliefs on national ownership, integration and the rest; and they could find some degree of support even in such documents as the pre-war report of the Royal Commission on transport.
It should have been no part of the theory to weigh down the railways with an impossible burden of responsibility, to subject the road haulage industry to the torture of a thousand cuts and almost encourage trade and industry to put more vehicles on the road under C licence. State ownership was brought about at an appalling cost in efficiency and integration remained as elusive a goal as ever.
On co-operation and co-ordination there was a good deal of common ground within the transport industry and even among the politicians. Unfortunately the ETC was not built on that ground. There may still be haunting it the ghost of the transport system which might have evolved if a sensible foundation had been laid.
It is an unquiet ghost. Its workings can be seen in the rival political parties. It acts compulsively and sets in motion those vacillations which the THC report interprets as the swing of the pendulum. If that report has done anything to lay the ghost there should be general gratitude.