Labour promises to nationalise haulage
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IATIONALISATION of road haulage is back on the Labour arty's shopping list, and it says it will not compensate any hareholders who buy an interest in the National Freight ompany, teports ALAN MI LLAR .
In its draft manifesto, the arty's National Executive Corniittee has called for NFC to be laintained as a 100 per cent ublicly-owned undertaking, ld for an extension of public Nnership in the haulage inustry.
It has also repeated its call for
National Transport Planning uthority as a means of cordinating resources, and it ws it wants stricter controls to ?placed on the use of lorries.
The draft manifesto says that lorries should bear all attributable road costs, and adds: "We will take further steps to reduce noise and pollution and resist proposals which would mean heavier juggernauts on our roads.'"
Labour Party transport subcommittee secretary Tim Lamport told CM that nationalisation would not affect every haulage company, but he could not say exactly what form it would take.
'We are not specifically committed to any particular scale of state control, but we are interested in providing an overall integrated system,'" he said.
He said that industries which are being denationalised by the present Government — including National Freight — would be nationalised again without compensation, as this is in line with a recent Labour conference decision.
But he said it would be grossly unfair" if the same happened to other companies which were taken into state ownership, and indicated that the proprietors of these businesses, who have had no prior warning that their invest ments would be nationalised, would receive compensation.
The Road Haulage Association reiterated its policy this week, saying it is fundamentally opposed to any public involvement in road haulage, and said that the flirtatiOn with nationalisation in the early 1950s showed that this was a "nonrunner".
-Every decision taken since then has taken us further away from nationalisation. After the privatisation of NFC, there will be no public involvement in road haulage, and we can see no case for there being any.'"
He went on to denounce the Labour proposals — which assume that there will be a general election now — as "bearing little relation to political and economic reality as we know it today."
And he said that they could not be justified as a means of making the industry more responsive to the law. "Provided that laws are framed properly and are enforced properly, then privately-owned operators are more likely to be flexible and to adapt to change than a large bureaucracy where staff are more interested in protecting their positions than in providing the public with a service."