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CRUNCH TIME
Page 5
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• Whatever you do, do not assume that our lead story on 40 tonnes this week is just another boring chapter in the endless saga of Britain's pitiful inability to agree with our European partners on truck weights.
It is the last gasp push of the Freight Transport Association's campaign to persuade the Transport Secretary and his obdurate department that we really should not still be limping along behind the rest of the EC, punishing industry with an additional £200 million in unnecessary freight costs every year. It is, indeed, crunch time. Paul Channon will decide in the next three weeks whether our industry is going to be let off the leash and allowed to run with the rest of the pack, or whether we remain chained to the kennels.
Higher lorry weights, we are constantly told, are unpopular with voters and the Tory party stands to suffer opposition and controversy if it allows those nasty "juggernauts" to flatten every Conservative shire in the land. Surely not?
Firstly, when has the Thatcher administration ever shied away from the unpopular or controversial if it believes the change is justifiable? Look at abolishing the metropolitan authorities or poll tax. Secondly, if the ludicrous suggestion that all of our bridges will crumble under the extra burden is correct, why does the DTp decline to prove it? International hauliers find our line of defence on bridges too silly for words when they travel through Greece and Portugal where high GVWs are allowed.
Channon and his party have the sort of Parliamentary majority that can steamroller anything through the House, if they put their mind to it. Support the changes with the correct background information, such as a con-esponding decline in the country's heavy vehicle population as a result, and only the hardliners will still object. And they will probably object to anything at any time.
It never ceases to amaze Commercial Motor that the European Commission is so patient with the UK_ At long last, there are signs that our derogation from the 40-tonne European minimum standard could be swept away, regardless of our so-called power of veto.
Britain is not even a transit country. Continental hauliers do not come to the UK to get somewhere else, in the same way that our TIR hauliers travel through France, West Germany, Spain and the Benelux countries to get to the EC's extremeties. What is our Government so frightened of, when others are so confident that they are even prepared to go higher than 40 tonnes GVW, as in the Netherlands?
The farce has gone on long enough. The FTA believes that it is now or never on lorry weights. Help yourself and your business by writing to Paul Channon at the Department of Transport, 2 Marsham Street, London SW1 telling him to protect your job and to do his job by practising what his administration has long preached — free and fair competition on equal terms with the rest of the European Community.