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MILD and BITTER
Page 86
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THE soft sell approach which the Minister of Transport has adopted towards trade and industry may be found effective. So quietly and discreetly does she recommend the Freightliner services of British Railways that it would be churlish to take offence. Only subsequently is the suspicion likely to arise that she has been practising a commercial break on behalf of her favourite
form of transport.
After one or two complimentary references to their maintenance inspection service and to their experiments with night deliveries, Mrs. Castle reminded members of the Traders Road Transport Association at their annual dinner last week that they were not primarily in business in order to transport goods by road. As she understood it their job was to find and use whatever means was most reliable, most efficient and most cheap for shifting their firm's goods. A transport manager should be something more than just the manager of a lorry fleet. With this brief and tantalizing glimpse of wider horizons Mrs. Castle was launched on her theme. "Does it always make economic sense to your own firm", she asked, "to move freight by lorry over quite long distances?" She suspected that there were some members of the TRTA who "could rationalize their operations a good deal if they took a cool, impartial look at the Freightliner services British Railways are offering today".
GREAT THINGS PROMISED Mrs. Castle promised great things from the National Freight Organization, which would be the sales and management structure for the new technical development with the basic job of selling "a door-to-door freight service to industry". It would be a thrusting and expanding organization. She appealed to her listeners to judge it fairly on the standards of quality and reliability which they expected and examine carefully what it had to offer them. Disarmingly the Minister stressed that the new body would have no unfair advantages. It would have to stand the test—"the very stiff test"—of competition from long-distance road haulage. She was not the enemy of road transport as she had sometimes been depicted. She believed firmly in its future. Although she wanted to get as much as possible of the bulk haul of goods over long distances on to the railways, that was "only common sense". The railways had spare capacity and the roads did not. The slightly suspect logic of this argument is fractured a little further when one remembers the statement from the Ministry about the permission to be granted the railways to carry parcels and sundries traffic throughout by road instead of by rail in certain circumstances. One such circumstance is where the rail route involves a short distance in a conurbation and passes over extremely busy lines and junctions. The extent to which the road route might be congested is apparently not to be taken into account.
ROAD CONGESTION NOT UNIVERSAL .The "spare capacity" with which Mrs. Castle credits the railways does not therefore extend to the whole system. It is equally true that road congestion is not universal. It is chiefly to be found in just those regions —such as the Walsall to Birmingham route given by the Ministry as an example— where it is proposed to add to the burden of traffic by diverting goods from rail.
On this matter also Mrs. Castle is careful not to treat road operators unfairly. Not only is the new liberty for the railways severely circumscribed but they will continue to he bound by the requirements of the licensing system. The Minister has also stipulated that they may not acquire extra vehicles for the specific purpose of exercising their new right and they will take full account of the availability of the vehicles of the Transport Holding Company.
MINISTER'S DETERMINATION
Within a few days the Transport Tribunal was to hint that perhaps the railways had never needed to apply for licences at all. Of this ironical comment the Minister had no knowledge at the time when the announcement was made by her Ministry.
She deserves credit for her determination —in the face one imagines of considerable opposition from within her own Party—not to impose unfair restrictions on road operators and more especially on hauliers. They have apparently given her that credit. In reply to a question last week she told the House of Commons that she had consulted the Road Haulage Association on her proposals for the National Freight Organization and was "glad to say that its reaction was generally favourable". Hauliers evidently bear her no grudge for her occasional mild propaganda before selected audiences on behalf of the railways.
WHOLE QUESTION Not all propaganda can be regarded with the same equanimity. The BBC television programme Tomorrow's World promised to examine the "whole question" of the jackknifing problem. The account which followed could only leave the impression that operators as a whole were indifferent to the problem although it could be solved by the use of a single device. Surely this cannot go on, it was concluded. "To get this lifesaving device widely used legislation is probably necessary."
Had the programme been sponsored by the manufacturers of the device it might still have been considered unfair. As it is the great majority of the public would be inclined to believe that the BBC had given the whole story and that the attitude of road operators was indefensible. Few people would stop to think that the cost of the damage caused by jack-knifing—especially if it happened as frequently as the programme led one to suppose—would in itself force even the most selfish and callous of operators into taking whatever preventive measures were available.
The Ministry of Transport and many bodies within the industry have been carrying out research and have tested various methods of dealing with the problem. This should have been obvious to the people responsible for compiling the programme. What evidence is there that inquiries were made into what was being done or in fact that the BBC consulted anyone outside, the makers of the equipment given such flattering publicity? Jack-knifing and the patient and ingenious efforts which have been made and are still being made to prevent it could have formed the subject of an interesting programme. It is regrettable that the opportunity should have been sacrificed in favour of yet another attack on road transport operators in general.