Bright future ahead for NFC
Page 7
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
NATIONAL Freight Corporation results were expected to be announced last night (Thursday) during the long awaited Parliamentary transport debate which took place as CM went to press.
As the debate approached, a hint from Transport Minister William Rodgers gave credence to strong rumours of a £4 million trading profit during 1976.
But it is thought that interest payments and pension fund provisions inherited from British Rail will turn the profit into a loss of around £15m.
The minister could well be influenced in making his statement on transport by the NFC figures, but he has hinted in answering a Parliamentary question from Tory MP Colin Shepherd that the 1976 figures are expected to be "much better than 1975."
Mr Rodgers said that "real progress is being made in getting rid of this deficit." The 1975 loss made by the NFC was £31m.
NFC chairman Sir Dan Pettit says the improvement is due to his new management team which was brought in to head the various subsidiary companies including Freightlibers, NCL, BRS and the special traffics companies.
Last year NCL alone lost El0m, and it has already put the 1976 figure at £5m. Some of the loss can be put down to cuts in staff which has been reduced from 25,000 seven years ago to just 14,000.
BRS has also managed to improve its financial position from last year's record profit of £4m to around £5.75m this year.
Improvements in the positions of Freightliners and NCL have also been partly put down to a strike-free year on the railways which governs the amount of traffic carried by the two.
The majority of the improvement in trading has come from cuts within the NFC. Freightliners is the only company to have increased its traffic over the year.
Numbers of containers carried went up by 24,000 to 731,900 in 1976, and the company is expected to turn in a profit of £1.3m compared with the Elm loss last year. They are said to be budgeting for a £1.8m profit during the next year.
Even with this level of profit, experts comment that the company has still not reached the level needed for it to generate capital investment from within.
It is thought that the company may have to face the possibility of closing some of its 24 freight terminals but in the meantime they are expanding in more profitable areas including Poole and Ipswich where new terminals are due to open this year.
Mr Rodgers has been under pressure to return both NCL and Freightliners to the railways for some time, and it is thought that this pressure could be successful and may be used as a morale booster for the new British Rail management.