HONEYMOON OVER
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WAR is likely to break out in earnest before very long between road operators and the Minister of Transport and between road operators and the railways. The surprisingly long period of mutual tolerance is coming to an end. The breach will take place even before Mrs. Castle publishes her next White Paper or introduces legislation.
Signs of what is to come are all the clearer for not being always deliberate. The railway game of snakes and ladders was intended as a rather ponderous joke. The general public in so far as they are interested have seen it as an advertisement in bad taste, an almost venomous attack on the road operator.
Some of the recipients in top management of trade and industry may also have wondered to what extent it reflects the railways' opinion of their intelligence and sense of humour.
Road operators and road users are coming closer together in face of the common threat.
Their points of view are by no means identical. Traders with their own vehicles resent the disturbance of an ancient right. Hauliers see themselves simultaneously robbed of traffic by the railways at one end of the scale and by their own customers at the other.
Trade and industry fear that in one way or another the transport service they are to receive will be less efficient and more expensive.
Common ground is dislike and suspicion of Government policy and it is bound to promote concerted action.
Clearly explained
Mrs. Castle has explained that policy more clearly than she may have intended. On more than one occasion she will hear quoted back to her the reflections on licensing in general which she embodied in her pronouncement last month.
She harked back to her gnomic statement in her White Paper of July 1966 that it was necessary to devise a licensing system which would be "an effective instrument of a modern, national freight policy".
In itself this was unexceptionable. Operators could not quarrel with the principle. Unfortunately it admitted to as many interpretations as there were different philosophies of transport.
What mattered in the long run was the particular gloss which the Minister decided to put on her own words.
The answer is now known. There are only two "valid objectives", says Mrs. Castle. The first is the protection of public safety. The second is "to ensure that a more rational division of traffic between road and rail is achieved".
She may already be wishing that she had added to the list if only for the sake of appearances. As has already been pointed out an impartial inquiry into the subject might have brought other objectives to light and might have eliminated at least one of the Minister's two candidates.
Her responsibility is to Parliament and to the public. She has to contend with many conflicting duties. One of the most important of them must be to see that trade and industry have available the transport facilities they need. Their own wishes are the first consideration.
Limiting factors
There may be limiting factors such as the inadequacy of the roads. The Minister would also need to consider whether the transport facilities would be improved if there were some control, for example, over the growth of the road haulage industry or the development of the railways.
The thought that Mrs. Castle must have given to these key subjects does not come to the surface in her statement. She is concerned only to ensure, admittedly with certain provisos, that maximum use is made of rail freight services and that road operators who do not look after their businesses or vehicles should be punished.
Co-operation between road and rail is also outside the Minister's scheme of things. She is driving a wedge between State-owned transport and independent hauliers and between the railways and their customers.
Where the traffic is that which she wishes the railways to have, the circumstances will be much the same as under nationalization nearly 20 years ago.
Hauliers (and also traders in future) will have to apply humbly for permits. There will be no other way of administering the system; and as previously the permits will specify exactly what traffic may be carried, for what distances and over what routes. Permission will also have to be sought for the carriage of return loads.
The proposed intervention of the Licensing Authority and the right of appeal seem almost a mockery when the applicant will be required not only to prove his own case but to disprove that of the railways. The relationship between the two forms of transport will inevitably become embittered.
The negotiating machinery which paradoxically has helped to bring them together in the past will no longer be appropriate. The attempt to broaden the scope of the co-operation will be abandoned.
What of the road safety element'? Nobody doubts that Mrs. Castle is passionately concerned at the growth in the number of accidents and casualties and is tackling the problem energetically over a wide field, This does not altogether obliterate the impression left by last month's statement and particularly by her use of statistics.
In any other context restrictions and punishments as the sole instruments of policy would seem a doctrine of despair. Road safety may be to some extent an exception. People cannot be allowed to do as they please on the roads and there must be penalties if they fail to conform.
It is conceded, however, that the authorities also have obligations. They must provide better and safer roads, they must prescribe standards for vehicles, driving tests and so on.
Enforcement and responsibilities are two sides of the same administrative coin. In her plans for the road transport industry Mrs. Castle seems to be using a double-headed penny: she wants standards to be greatly improved with stiffer and more frequent penalties for failure; at the same time she makes the prospects even less attractive— at any rate in road haulage.
Temptation
The connection between the two is familiar to her. Her reason for giving the Licensing Authority power to investigate the financial standing of an applicant is that "operators in financial difficulties are sometimes tempted to neglect maintenance, overload vehicles and overwork their drivers". She does not draw the obvious moral.
The bad operator as Mrs. Castle depicts him may be compared with the criminal driven to steal by poverty. The sensible remedy is to cure his poverty rather merely than to punish the offence. When the circumstances improve the temptation disappears.
Mrs. Castle ought to apply the principle throughout the career of the applicant instead of, as it appears, making it even more difficult to be a successful haulier.
Janus