Road Haulage—the TUC View
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THE Trades Union Congress has welcomed the acceptance by the National Board for Prices and Incomes of the need to strengthen the structure of the road haulage industry and to secure this by enlargement of the size of fleets. The TUC hopes that the Board and the Government will examine this question further and will consider what action may be needed from outside to help promote this development. The TUC General Council itself intends to publish in the near future a statement on transport policy, in which particular attention will be given to this issue and particularly to the need for the extension of the activities of British Road Services.
Announcing this after the economic committee of the TUC had examined the interim report of the Prices and Incomes Board on road haulage rates, a statement to the Press added that the TUC recognized that the Board was required to prepare this report quickly, with the result that it had insufficient time to investigate fully costs within the industry and the actual effect on haulage rates of previous recommendations by the Road Haulage Association, While recognizing the need for increased productivity, the TUC emphasized that this primarily depended on the efficient use of vehicles, on investment in more modern handling equipment, and on the exploitation of the undoubted economies of scale that exist in the road haulage industry. " The test of this report," the TUC statement concluded. "will lie not so
much in changes in road haulage rates as in the willingness of employers and
unions in the industry to co-operate in the future studies that are foreshadowed in the report, and in the degree of confidence with which manufacturers and unions generally will engage with the board in an examination of their actions and practices."