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Shocking example
UNFORTUNATELY for the Ministry of Transport its proposals for unprecedented increases in licensing fees have come in the middle of a series of announcements about other higher operating costs and about higher rates. When a fee is multiplied in some cases 14 times at one bureaucratic stroke it seems relatively modest for operators on whom the burden falls to charge their own customers no more than an extra 12+ or 15 per cent to cover cost increases in general.
Hauliers will be disappointed if they had hoped to glean from the Ministry some useful hints on the best way to present their own case. In its explanation of the higher fees the Ministry puts forward no new ideas and parades even the familiar arguments in a way that carries no conviction.
The fees are designed, says the Ministry, "solely to cover the cost of licensing and enforcement." There ought to be no other conceivable purpose. Far from consoling operators the phrase can only remind them that any surplus funds would be retained by the Ministry and not returned to the industry from which they had come.
Making matters worse for itself the Ministry affirms that the additional administrative cost "can only be met from licence fees." This may be the logical and tidy way of looking at the problem. But operators could easily suggest other sources from which the money could come; and the Freight Transport Association has already drawn attention to the promise by Mrs.
Barbara Castle, when she was Minister, that the revenue from operators' licensing would not be any more than from carriers' Licensing. On this argument it should be the duty of the Government to provide the extra money said to be needed.
No yardstick
Has the need been correctly assessed? The Ministry's analysis is vague. Every effort has been made, it says, to keep costs "to a minimum consistent with efficiency," This meaningless remark may be the obligatory gesture that everyone wanting a price increase is expected to make in the general direction of Ceres the goddess of productivity.
There is no yardstick against which the efficiency of the licensing system can be measured. Complaints are usually about delays in dealing with requests on licensing or enforcement. The delays might be reduced by speeding up the rate at which decisions are made. Complaints would then come from operators against whom the decisions had gone.
On one point at least the Ministry is on firm ground. The present fees for A, B and C licences were fixed in 1957 and, says the Ministry incontrovertibly, "there have been general increases in costs over the past 12 years." More information might have been given when so large an increase is sought. What is more relevant, for example, is whether the current fees were adequate in 1968 and have remained adequate in 1969.
Somehow the Ministry has absorbed the "general increases in costs" and more information ought to be given on how this has happened before higher charges are sanctioned. The only suggestion from the Ministry is that the number of outdoor enforcement staff has "more than doubled over the period." Although the statistics may not be entirely clear it is probable that there has been a similar or greater increase in the number of heavier vehicles with a consequent doubling or trebling of the licence revenue from those vehicles.
It is only vans and lorries weighing over 30cwt unladen for which fees now have to be paid. What seems likely is that the revenue from the lighter vehicles has been largely used for enforcement work on the larger vehicles so that the loss of the revenue will leave a financial gap.
Van operators cannot have objected to this particular diversion of funds. They are of course still liable to roadside spot checks by Ministry examiners and it is ironical that the cost of these checks will now be met out of the fees paid by operators of the larger vehicles. It might have been better to have retained some form of Licensing even for vans. A fee of .E1 a vehicle a year would have made it possible to reduce by one third the sums now to be demanded for operators' licences.
What may arouse disproportionate annoyance is the one apparent concession. The fee for an operator's licence is to be £4 a vehicle a year but it has been possible, says the Ministry, "to propose reductions in the existing fees" for the carriers' licences still required when vehicles have a plated weight of over 16 tons. The A or B licence fee comes down from £2 and 12 lOs respectively to I Os and the C licence fee from 6s to 4s.
Why a carriers' fee?
The concession has been made because much of the work of administration and enforcement is common to both types of licensing. As the operator sees it, however, he not only has to pay considerably more for his first licence but will have its use restricted by a second licence for which he has to pay an extra fee: As the revenue from carriers' licences will bring in only £50,000 or so a year it would have been an inexpensive gesture to waive it completely.
Whatever fee is finally decided for an operator's licence ought to take into account the automatic increase in revenue likely to result from the steady rise in the number of heavier vehicles. Even if the Ministry chooses to ignore the figures there will be plenty of reminders during the coming months from the group of organizations that are protesting against the proposal for an increase in the maximum permitted weights of lorries.
The strategy of the protestors is already becoming clear. It is to confuse the issue as much as possible and to make frequent changes in the point of attack. A useful start on the first item is invariably to quote figures of tonnage without specifying whether what is meant is unladen weight, payload or gross vehicle weight. This can be followed up by giving a set of statistics out of context. When they are challenged the second line of attack is adopted by producing different figures.
Not long ago the suggestion was that heavy lorries were far more dangerous than other vehicles. The only proof offered was the number of accidents in which heavy vehicles were involved. Needless to say the suggestion was no longer tenable when the comparative statistics were put side by side.
The numbers of the vehicles themselves provide the next target. It has been discovered that the number of goads vehicles weighing over 3 tons unladen has gone up from 127,000 in 1955 to 428,000 in 1968—news which must gladden the heart of the Ministry's tax collectors but not apparently of the Pedestrians' Association for Road Safety.
Dubious proposition
According to Mr. T. C. Foley the increase has been at a higher rate than for any other .
class of vehicle. Broadly speaking this is correct. The next most rapid rate of increase is in the number of cars which went up three times in the course of the 13 years—one may wonder why Mr. Foley chose this particular interval—as against the heavy goods vehicle increase of between three and 3+ times. But the car total in 1968 was nearly 1 lm which makes the comparison hardly worth making.
The traffic should go by rail, say the opponents of road transport. Before this dubious proposition can even be considered Mr. Foley would have to subdivide his 428,000 vehicles to discover how many were carrying goods which it was even remotely possible to send by any other means. To begin with he would find that perhaps a third of them were tippers.
At her most optimistic Mrs. Castle thought even two years ago that perhaps 10 per cent of road ton-mileage could be diverted to rail. She also believed that road transport would soon make up the loss so that there is little comfort here for road transport's opponents.
Clearly if there had not been a steady increase in the average weight and carrying capacity of lorries many more of them would have been needed to carry the goods. There is no escaping the conclusion that restrictions with this purpose in view would not only have put up the price of goods but would actually have increased congestion and the number of accidents.