LICENSING CASEBOOK
Page 46
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By John Darker, AMBIM
The cat among the pigeons !
NATIONAL REPERCUSSIONS FROM STOKE ST. MICHAEL REFUSAL?
THE Western LA's decision refusing the Contract A renewal bid by Stoke St. Michael Transport Co. Ltd., reported on page 41 has put the cat among the pigeons with a vengeance. Many tipper operators awaited the result with great interest and if, in the event, the consequences prove financially embarrassing this may be the price necessary to put the industry's house in order.
I shall be surprised if the effects of this courageous (and in my view fully justified) decision do not snowball. There is no logical case for confining the dubious short-run benefits of the decision to the Western Area alone. Whilst other areas might wish the West to pioneer a new structure of licensing and rates controls which could be applied painlessly to tipper operations nationally, I feel strongly that the abuses revealed in the Stoke St. Michael and earlier Western area cases, which Mr. J. R. C. Samuel-Gibbon's decision is calculated to prevent in future, will not be put right until other LAs probe as thoroughly into the realities of quarry tipper operations.
The Stoke St. Michael case, brilliantly exploited as it was by a dedicated band of objectors, can hardly be unique, though the opportunities it provided for Sammy Gibbon's cool dissection were considerable.
Firstly, though the Ford Trader fourwheel tipper concerned in the application was of 3T 12c unladen weight, with a recommended carrying capacity of 7 tons, a supporting rates schedule attached to the contract showed rates based on a carrying capacity of 9 tons. After a spate of evidence touching on the scale of payments normal for quarry tipping work, and suggestions by the objectors that the 9-ton maximum rear axle loading must be exceeded when a vehicle of this category was loaded to 14 tons overall, the LA was clearly minded to delve deeper.
Weighing an equivalent
The scrapping of the vehicle concerned in the application did not prevent the LA getting his engineers to obtain a similar vehicle for test weighing. This example of what one might term bureaucratic integrity is, I think, highly praiseworthy. It would have been easy to be fobbed off on this crucial part of the case.
As we now know, and as the applicants themselves willingly concede, the maximum safe load of this type of tipper is now accepted as 8 tons and not 9 or 9 plus. (Will the makers heave a sigh of relief?) Strange, that what thousands of operators and engineers had suspected was the case is at the eleventh hour confirmed by the Western LA. What will the Ministry in London make of that, I wonder? Did it never occur to them, years ago, to determine the matter?
The failure of Wainwrights, the supporting customers, to send a witness to the enquiry who was competent to answer all relevant questions from the LA and the objectors was another pinprick which nettled Mr. Samuel-Gibbon. The representative (Mr. Hatton) Wainwrights sent "was wholly unable to answer any of the questions that arise". To make matters worse, the applicants rejected any suggestion of an adjournment to enable a competent witness from Wainwrights to attend.
In his painstaking dissection of the evidence given on the question of rates the LA's diagnosis of the ills of the tipper industry is masterly. He remembered that at the first hearing, last November, Mr. Massey (director of the applicant company) said that on average an economical rate for vehicle operation of the vehicles in question would be Is. 4d. or Is. 6d. per mile, and that he would not be prepared to work for much less than that.
What rate is economic?
The LA has heard a lot of evidence in recent months on tipper operating costs and he says, with conviction, that he would want cogent evidence to induce him to believe that Mr. Massey put the figures too high. Yet when the hearing was resumed, four months later, Mr. Massey said he didn't know the operating costs in full detail, except that the overall figure for the whole fleet was Is. 9d. per mile, "with tippers falling below that figure to an extent which he was unable to state. That statement" said the LA, bluntly, "is not one which I am able to believe."
With the benefit of the revenue figures before him, the LA was unable to assess the true figure of earnings per mile at even Is. 4d. per mile. Indeed, he quotes a remark of Mr. Massey, accepted by all the parties, that before July 14, 1965, the actual rate per mile was "somewhere in the region of a shilling a mile or thereabouts on long distance". The LA worked out various "mixes" of shortand long-distance operations but all his calculations reflected an element of overall net loss. The LA is not afraid to say, baldly, "the gross earnings ... were achieved only at the cost of a substantial element of unlawful operation". and later in his decision he says: "Habitual overloading in breach of the law is in itself a matter which I cannot overlook or condone, particularly if it be the fact (as the applicants' solicitors have suggested in correspondence) that the practice is widespread."
Mr. Samuel-Gibbon puts the "habitual persistent charging of uneconomic rates" within the same category of abuses he cannot overlook or condone, because of its effects on other licence-holders struggling to exist in an over-competitive industry. The reality of this struggle is typified by the "strike" of West Country tipper operators on July 14, last year, to which the LA refers in his decision.
Small wonder, then, that the LA should refuse to grant the licence. Astringent to the last, he refers in his final paragraph to evidence from Mr. Massey that vehicles working for Wainwrights, loaded overnight, not infrequently ran to Odiham and back twice in a day, a journey of some 310 miles. Others beside Mr. Massey not only have done but, apparently, are still doing daily journeys of this order. Though not a determining factor in the case, we need not be surprised that the LA's enforcement staff are to be asked to investigate such operations.
Before the dust settles on the vexed question of tipper rates and, indeed, on the organization of the tipping industry generally, a lot more dirty water may have to be filtered.
Quarry owners changing
In the Western area, at least, I understand that Somerset County Council own three quarries, the largest at Wells, and I suspect county councils elsewhere may own quarries. At Westbury-sub-Mendip, an interest in a 21-acre limestone quarry has just been acquired by Imperial Tobacco Company's Pension Fund, and ICI, it is reported, are also buying some loan stock in the deal. I mention this as a pointer to the changing pattern of quarry ownership. Many responsible nationally known managements, not to mention road-building organizations and public authorities, have some responsibility for the conditions and remuneration of the tipper industry.
The Western LA's initiative has opened the door to a new pattern of responsible operation. May it not be time for larger transport concerns to tackle the organizational headaches of this vitally necessary job? That, in my view, is the moral. Tipper group organizers may one day pack a big enough punch to negotiate all the necessary business aspects with the quarry masters; the RHA may go into business; whatever the outcome, if evidence similar to that given in the Stoke St. Michael case is repeated ad nauseum elsewhere, the industry will have itself to blame.