Every little helps
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News that the 3ppl fuel duty rise scheduled for 1 August is to be scrapped broke late as CM was going to press (p6). Duty is to be frozen for the rest of the year as chancellor George Osborne caved into pressure from FairFuelUK and its new found, and slightly unusual, supporter – the Labour Party.
Osborne says the government is “doing everything we can in very, very difficult economic circumstances” to help businesses. This victory is another in the longer campaign for the true prize: profit. Running a haulage business has become a war of attrition.
Sean Wrafter, boss of soon-to-be liquidated Wrafter Haulage, was brutally honest in his assessment of the failure of the 25-year-old firm (p14). The cancellation of one contract was the end of the firm. “The haulage industry isn’t the easiest to be involved in,” he tells us, “but we had limited success. It gave us a good living and it gave a few drivers a good living too over the years.”
CM thanks Wrafter for his honesty, and his particularly acute description of life at the cutting edge of haulage. I’d wager that a few of you out there would agree with him. Life in haulage isn’t the easiest.
It is a brutal and cut-throat business and has always been so, from the first moment that one enterprising wag in his dapper Argyll light van offered to do the job for two pennies less than the gentleman up the road. Freezing fuel duty for the rest of the year won’t be the golden bullet that helps Wrafter in his return to haulage, but it will make the world of difference to running costs, outgoings and profit for hauliers up and down the country. Christopher Walton