MEETING THE MINISTER
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Last week Commercial Motor was granted an exclusive interview with the Minister of Transport. Mr. Marsh answered questions put to him by CM's editor on many aspects of transport policy and practice
Editor: Minister, now that the policy battles are largely over for a while, transport operators are hoping that the implementing regulations which you'll be making on the Act will reflect a very practical, thoughtful approach. Will you be taking real account of representations from the industry? There is strong apprehension about this, and a hope for businesslike discussions.
Minister: Well, we probably would have reached that stage earlier if some of the people who are now getting worried about the consultations had not made such a political jamboree of it. The thing I personally regret on these sort of Bills, which are very important, have a lot of economic impact and affect a lot of people's lives, is that there is quite so much noise as there was on this particular Bill. We have got over this, but now I hope that we can get down to an intelligent conversation, because a lot of the conversation has not been particularly intelligent over the past couple of years. Obviously we want to consult people and get their views; and what I am concerned with is making the thing work as best it can. I am not involved in a war against the road hauliers or anybody else. I'm just engaged in trying to get a decent transport system working. But] think that very often what people mean by consultation is agreement; well, I should certainly want to hear their views and have discussions, because they should know more about it than I do or the Ministry does. It doesn't necessarily follow that one will agree with everything they say, but the consultation will take place and, as I say, I hope the industry will now stop -politicking" and let us have some sort of discussion,
Editor: Turning to a quite different topic, we have been getting a lot of queries lately about the international haulage business, largely because of the German quota. Is there any chance that quotas will keep up with the development of traffic, or will these be a limit on what might be achieved in international transport? Minister: The problem here is that, while as a country we are against quotas, there is no in. ternational convention on this: things can only be agreed on a bilateral basis. There are a lot of bilateral agreements, widely different, and the whole thing is a bit of a muddle. What we are doing in the various international bodies we are in is battling away trying to dissuade countries from taking this particular quota path, but it is a very unsatisfactory position I'm afraid.
Editor: The White Paper on the Transport of Freight was quite specific that reductions in drivers' hours would have to be preceded by clear steps towards increased productivity. It does not seem even remotely possible at present to justify the latter statement, yet the first hours cuts are due next year. Do you think we are going to get a rapid upsurge in productivity agreements and negotiations between now and then?
Minister: I would hope so. Of course, the White Paper was based on the assumption of a first-stage reduction to nine hours, but I chang ed that to give a bit more flexibility so that we are now in a somewhat different situation. This seems to me as a newcomer to be an industry which has got the potential for very, very big productivity advances—which could give the men more money, run the industry more effectively and provide the men with better working conditions.
Given that situation, I can't believe that people are going to go on for ever opposing any change on the basis that it's different. And I really find it difficult to understand the hoo-ha about tachographs—I've tried desperately to understand this. These are people whose hourly rates are pretty low, whose conditions are pretty low, who run the risk when they break the law of losing their licences and thus their livelihood—here is a device which is acceptable in many, many other countries, which is likely to be compulsory on the Continent anyhow in a couple of years. I cannot see what conceivable damage or harm it can do—there are advantages both for the men and for society generally. If one can get reductions in hours and introduce tachographs then you have a position where you can enforce the transport law (as opposed to the civil law) and also where you can produce productivity agreements which would give the men more money and cut out some of the practices which exist.
Editor: Operators certainly hope that, if they've got to have tachographs, they'll get them as part of a general talk on productivity: so that they will get something in return and not have to use them simply to enable legislation—on hours, for instance—to be enforced.
Minister: Yes, there is the matter of driving hours in terms of public safety, and the question of productivity.
Editor: There has been criticism of the Ministry's failure to "sell" the plating and testing scheme. You may not accept this view, but have the criticisms prompted any thoughts about how communication between Ministry and industry might be improved—in both directions? Do the latest figures suggest that. on testing, operators have now "got the message"?
Minister: I don't know what more we could have done to "sell" it. We sent out something like 300,000 circulars (they're still going out) to Traffic Area offices, garages, oil companies and so on. In August and September we had 900 column inches in the provincial Press alone on this subject; we have published a manual; we have had television coverage about this. Even the criticism of our failure to "sellhas had a fair amount of publicity.
We have been right through the industry and we now have a pretty steady flow of vehicles. One of the things that we are coming to conclude is that we probably over-estimated the number of vehicles. What we think is happening is that a lot of people, faced with the test, are running the vehicles down and scrapping, Short of knocking on people's doors and telling them individually, I don't know what else we can do to let them know about the test.
Editor: Is the Government going to make it necessary for a valid testing certificate to be presented before an excise licence for a heavy goods vehicle can be issued or renewed? Many people feel this is an essential means of enforcing annual testing and thus being fair to the conscientious operator.
Minister: This we are going to do. We can't do it at the moment because it has to be operated by local taxation offices and post offices and in the beginning, when some vehicles require testing and plating and some don't, this will obviously be a very complex operation. But I hope to make an announcement on this in the near future and certainly the intention eventually is to do just this.
Editor: Changing topics completely—what aspect of transport impressed you most in the USA during your recent visit?
Minister : I think one of the most impressive things was suddenly realizing that their problems were very much the same as ours in many fields, though the scale is sometimes different. One of the things was their recognition that public transport has a very big role to play and that probably one ought to start now moving towards the development of public transport rather than watching it wither away and die. I had many talks with the urban housing development people, who produced a very interesting little booklet called "Tomorrow's Transportation". Some of it is a bit science-fictionish, some of it is just using conventional modes and using them rather better : its minimum bus lanes and things of this ilk are now being recognized as being essential to this sort of society.
The other factor is the extent to which transport per se is an academic specialty which we have not really achieved. This is interesting, because one can argue whether one should seek to achieve it: whether it isn't probably better to have people in various disciplines as undergraduates, and then probably have different post-graduate facilities. I went to Kansas to read a paper to the transportation research forum and all the people there were professional transport people. They were not railway people or road people or bus people they were interested in transport, Editor: Hearing you speak of transport modes in that way reminds me that you spoke recently of a shift from transport mode to transport function. I'm not sure that your meaning is widely understood.
Minister: What I had in mind was really this. In talking of power, people don't frankly care whether they've got coal, gas, oil or electricity
— what they are interested in is energy. It is exactly the same in the transport field. This isn't a motorist Ministry or a railway Ministry or any other sort of "mode" Ministry—it's a Transport Ministry. What we are concerned with is shifting goods and people cheaply, efficiently and rapidly around the country, and this sometimes involves mixes of transport. But the obsession with modes and the great argument between the roads men and the rail men, and both of them against the canal man — this is not the issue.
Editor: Do you see any Government, of whatever hue, accepting a National Roads Board— or something like it ?
Minister: This is an interesting proposition, with a lot of problems in it. The first thing to get clear is exactly what one expects to get from this. People have moved away from the rather naive argument that because you pay a road tax this ought to be used for building new roads, because by the same token liquor duties ought to go to building new pubs— which has never been closely argued.
But this proposition is a thing which I ant interested in at the moment, and the BRF pamphlet gives a good basis for argument. There are some very real problems in it— such as how any Chancellor is going to give up control over.a large chunk of public expenditure and if he doesn't give it up, then what is it achieving ?
Editor: It did seem that one possible advantage might be that one would get more flexibility in financing roads. In other words one could go to private investment if Government funds were not available.
Minister: I think that this is a bit of a dicey argument because unless you can borrow money against your own revenue land on the whole it is argued that tolls are difficult here) then all you are really doing is raising a Treasury loan. No Chancellor is going to allow someone to be raising loans off their own bat against his borrowing capacity. But if you could produce your own revenue then I think that though there would still be arguments against such a Board as this raising loans on the market, they would be a lot weaker.
Editor: Do you think road pricing is coming soon—or is this five, 10 or 15 years away ?
Minister: Nearer 10 than five.
Editor: If it came in, would it be used purely as a means of sharing road space, or could it be used as a new source of revenue for roadbuilding ?
Minister: I think it could be both. The urban congestion problem might by then have become so serious that you had to have a diversion of resources on such a scale that those who contributed to the problem would have to pay something towards solving it. But I think there is a tendency to believe that the sole answer to urban congestion is to stop cars from coming into the centre. The other thing is better public transport. In London, for example, in the peak-hour periods 72,000 cars bring in 98,000 people, and 4,500 buses bring in 172,000—wherein lies a moral. But then one has to provide better public transport. We've never had a really good public transport system, geared to the sort of conditions that we've got today. We've tended to meet the congestion as it's come along with a bit of off-street parking here and a few yellow lines there. If we were to do a co-ordinated plan— using, say, computerised traffic management, bus lanes and so on, one might get to the situation where people voluntarily began to move across from the car to public transport.
Editor: In your reply to Councillor Trotter of Newcastle last week you stressed that it would be up to PTAs to negotiate locally with the National Bus Company. Would this policy of Ministerial non-intervention be maintained if experience showed major •common problems being thrown up in several PTAs?
Minister: Well, if it became a total shambles, then obviously one would try to do something. But the whole concept is based on the assumption that local people will produce that which they want. It is hoped that the PTAs and the NBC will be able to meet most of the problems between themselves. Because once you go down this line of Ministerial intervention in this sort of field then I think you finish up with the worst of every world. You transfer the administration from the Ministry and maintain the policy control at the Ministry. And if they recognize this, then I would have thought that the pressures on both sides would be to reach amicable agreements. I certainly do not intend to do any intervening at the moment on the negotiations.
Editor: Although spring 1969 has been given as the date for the first cuts in drivers' hours, we understand that this is likely to be inter
preted fairly loosely ; the bigger bus companies in particular would find it very difficult to corn plete their revised schedules and rotas before early summer. But summer would be a chaotic time for the coach tours operator to have to change—right in mid-season. Would it not he more sensible to set the time for the change in the autumn, so that it could be brought in with the winter schedules ?
Minister: Oh, we can talk about "when I've always said that I want to be satisfied that the chances of productivity agreements were good ones before this came in, and I certainly
want to be satisfied that there has been some progress in this direction. That is why I am now going to embark upon discussions with both sides of the bus industry. There are difficulties in this sort of change-over and I have already had representations on some of them, but on the other hand I have got pretty heavy pressures about drivers' hours, particularly in some of these fields. It was, in fact, pretty appalling things on the Continent which started all this controversy. There is a lot of evidence that Continental hours are now going to be more strictly enforced and we are involved in international discussions now, because they have brought their hours right down.
Editor: The Ministry is better endowed with economics experts than ever before. Will you be concentrating their efforts on any particular problems or projects? Will the Ministry keep the track-costs study going or will this now he put aside, at least for the time being ?
Minister: The first thing about the economists here is that they are very much part of the normal machine of the department. They do a lot of the work that we have to do in terms of capital programmes and nationalized industries, rail closures—routine business which is very much the large proportion of their work. They advise other departments, on the third London Airport, for example, the South East review regional studies, road schemes. The first thing is that they are not really just a project department, they really are part of our normal work here.
The other thing is, of course, that we have got a transport cost study over the whole field, which goes a bit wider than just the trackcosts model that is a part of it. There is no specific new thing which they will be embarking on. Some of them are very much engaged on road pricing at the moment, while
h-iodel incorporates a completely encapsulated miniature relay.
Also in the secret-switch category, the ignition immobilizer made by Barnacle Ltd., Barnacle Works, Bensham Lane, Croydon, CR9 2TU, is designed to confuse any thief who finds and operates the switch without knowing exactly how the system works. Of the flip type the switch has a delayed action and the engine cuts out after it has been running for 10-15sec. Starting the engine is impossible until the device has been switched off and a short delay period has elapsed. No key is used.
In the case of the Carlarm secret-switch system produced by D. and J. Peters Ltd., 19/20 Hatton Place, London EC1, a button is pressed when the ignition key is operated, otherwise the engine will not start. At the same time the horn is sounded and continues to do so until the ignition is "switched off".
In a secret-switch system devised by the author, a concealed dip-switch is connected to a separate horn. If the switch is in the "off" position, it breaks the ignition circuit and the horn operates when the ignition key is turned. The switch can be located under a floor mat.
The ignition immobilizer offered by Light Engineering, 155 St. Andrews Road, Bridport, Dorset, is available with an alarm system that operates if an attempt is made to start the vehicle. If the vehicle is parked at night, the system provides for the use of one front and one rear light.
A special siren producing an intermittent high-frequency note is a feature of the Scout Car Alarm system, produced by Scout Alarms Ltd., 193a Victoria Street, London SW1. It is controlled from the outside and the alarm is sounded if a door or the bonnet is opened.
A simple, low-cost method of immobilizing any type of vehicle—a telescopic bar that can be locked after hooking to the steering wheel and the clutch pedal—is produced by (a) Brown Brothers Ltd., Great Eastern Street, London EC2 (the Krooklok); (b) Hil!crest Engineering Ltd., 72-84 Great Barr Street, Birmingham 9 (the Stylelock); and (c) Barrisdale Engineers Ltd., a company associated with Hartlarm Ltd. (the Hooklock).
The Norrish company have evolved a variation of this type of lock in the form of a bar that clamps on to the steering wheel. An extension of the bar comes into contact with a fixed part of the cab structure if the wheel is turned more than a limited amount and this prevents the vehicle being driven on the road.
Known as the Combi, a combination type handbrake lock is made by the Waso company that is suitable for the majority of light vehicles having a push-button floor-mounted brake, The lock can be set with the fingers as the brake is being applied, Joseph Lucas Ltd., Great King Street, Birmingham 19, point out that a battery master switch can be used to immobilize the vehicle and at the same time to reduce the fire risk. Models are now available that are suitable for the batteries of diesel-engined as well as petrol-engined vehicles and according to the model may be fitted on the battery or on a panel mounted inside the vehicle.
A king-pin lock is produced by York Truck Equipment Ltd., St. Marks Road, Corby, Northants, for the protection of a semi-trailer. A robust collar is clamped on the king-pin and locked with a padlock. The king-pin lock offered by the Norrish company is available in two forms; in one case a Yale Sampson padlock clamps on the end of a pin inserted in the yoke of the lock and in the other a Bramah boss key mechanism is axially mounted on the end of the pin. by and large the bulk of what they are doing at present is work on road strategy. I hope to make an announcement at about the end of the year on the new post-1970 road strategy, which involves an enormous applied economic and mathematical analysis.
Editor: The Ministries of Transport and Technology have a joint interest in certain transport research. Could you tell us something about its scale. and perhaps a few of the projects which are being worked on?
Minister: We have got a joint Ministry of Transport and Mintech research committee working in this field. They have an annual budget, excluding salaries. of about £85,000 a year and I hope to see that very sizeably increased within the next year. So far, they have been dealing primarily with urban transportation—largely preliminary investigations. For example, they have been looking at a city transport system based on two four-seat cabs which would run along the grid of special tracks, with passengers being able to determine the destination. The whole thing being controlled automatically. They are studying another system, a bus which will run as a normal manually controlled vehicle on feeder routes and then transfer to a special track with automatic guidance along the main routes to and from the city. They are looking at travelators, the idea being like the one on Hungerford Bridge, where you have a flattenedout moving staircase travelling at about 10-15 m.p.h. so that you can speed up pedestrian movement from 3-4 m.p.h. to close on 20 m.p.h. All these are system studies involving travel demand. system capacity and so on, plus bread and butter stuff on things like the advanced passenger train. which is quite important.
Editor: Turning to carriers' licensing: nobody seems to have a convincing explanation of the policy judgment basis for introducing special authorizations (quantity licensing). If, as the phrase goes, -Freightliners have proved themselves" then presumably they will be running so well as not to need the forced traffic. If they haven't proved themselves
they will not be able to claim the traffic. For example, London-Glasgow now has "proved itself", so there is a waiting list of potential customers. Other routes have a lot of spare capacity. Have they proved themselves? Would I be right in thinking that in fact the intention is to introduce quantity licensing route by route, to boost traffic on the littleused services?
Minister: I have never understood why this particular issue caused such an uproar. because all that we are doing here is saying that there may be a very small margin which in the initial stages of the Freightliners may be going by road when it could go by rail— possibly in part through prejudice and lack of knowledge. It is a very small transfer that we are involved in, and makes very little difference to road haulage, but makes quite a lot of difference in the initial stages to the viability of the Freightliner system. All that you are doing is shaving off quite a small amount of the growth in road transport but achieving quite a big bringing-forward of the jumping-off point for the Freightliners. The amount involved for road is minimal.
Editor: The trouble is, of course, that in practice the shoe is going to pinch particularly hard in one or two places. You will get longdistance hauliers who will be particularly badly hit because they happen to run parallel with the main traffic flows, which tend to be in the giant -Fl" in the UK.
Minister: But they will only be in any problem if in fact British Rail can prove in front of an independent body that they can do the job at least as speedily, cheaply and reliably. It will be open to them to put their case. and I would think that the first time British Rail get a judgment in their favour and then cannot fulfil it, it will be used against them for ever more. They have to be very careful.