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192 
THE PROPER PRICE
Page 141
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DUBLIC figures such as Mr. Aubrey Jones have to create the illusion of infallibility. An admission that they might have lade a mistake would lead to a demand that the mistake should e put right and might have other awkward consequences beside. 11 the decisions of the Prices and Incomes Board are assumed to we equal validity. The final report on road haulage charges must A in any way contradict what was said in the interim report. It Light seem reasonable to suppose that bad the reference to the oard been the last rather than the first the result might have been my different; but nobody must say so.
In three television programmes last onth Mr. Jones discussed with Lord obens and Mr. Frank Cousins what ould happen after the freeze on prices id wages. When it came to his turn to :pound, Mr. Jones made his opinion ear that the work of the Prices and 'comes Board would continue. He also :fined what he considered to be its main action. The modern trend, he said, is 'wards powerful, militant unions (permified by Mr. Cousins) and equally rong business corporations or nearonopofies (personified by Lord obens). The situation is like that in the riddle Ages, with two sets of feudal irons instead of one and the powerless msumer ground down between them.
:ountervailing force The growth of great national and even ternational firms and unions should be elcomed, Mr. Jones continued. For the rotection of the public there must be a :ountervailing force." Mr. Jones envisaged Lis (naturally) as "a tribunal to which the irons in effect would be publicly accountale—in other words a tribunal before which .rtain wage claims or certain price increases r price decisions were brought". It might ien be necessary to give the decisions of Us tribunal. statutory effect.
Apart from the undoubtedly sinister treat of legal compulsion Mr. Jones's tesis is persuasive. In the present-day world f large organizations, he went on to say, competition does not exercise itself effecvely and does not in particular exercise self by way of reductions of prices". nether or not this statement receives eneral agreement, however, it certainly has o relevance to the road haulage industry to ihich Mr. Jones's talented "counterailing force" first directed its pulverizing ttention.
What the Prices and Incomes Board had a say about road haulage wages and proluctivity was sensible and useful. The onclusions on the subject of road haulage
rates are unsatisfactory and ambiguous. The blanket recommendations made by the Road Haulage Association were condemned. Presumably the intention was to keep the charges down. Simultaneously the Board suggested that more attention should be paid by the RHA and its members to the assessment of their true costs. If this advice were followed and the results put into effect there would most likely be a fairly general increase in rates.
Mr. Jones's analogy with feudal times may help towards an explanation. He may have envisaged the transport unions and the transport operators as barons and the transport users as the hapless serfs. There are strong traces of such an assumption in the two reports. It is true, if at all, over a very limited field indeed. For the most part it is the customer of the haulier who sits in the baronial hall. In many cases he even fixes for himself the rates he will pay. The need of some hauliers for protection rather than a curb is plain from the terms frequently imposed by licensing authorities, superficially in defiance of the Board, when granting applications for contract licences.
Rates recommendations by the RHA represented the only defence that the ordinary haulier knew against possible exploitation by his customers. Mr. Jones's medieval fixation prevented him from recognizing this. The recommendations may have been largely a bluff. At least they called periodical attention to the haulier's plight. Whether or not the Board was right in cutting this slender lifeline it was certainly wrong in providing no feasible alternative which would enable the haulier, particularly the small man, to continue to live and breathe and have his being.
Paying the price
In a word, the trader or manufacturer ought to pay the proper price for the transport he is using. The result if he does not do so is either that he starves operators out of business and to that extent impoverishes the road haulage industry as a whole or that he is getting his transport unfairly on the cheap at the expense perhaps of his competitors.
Both alternatives seem bad from the point of view of the national economy. Whatever costs are incurred in the long chain of events between raw material and consumer should be included in the price which the consumer pays.
Mr. Jones might not agree with this. A carefully worded recommendation in the Board's interim report on road haulage rates supports pressure by the RHA "to persuade its members to specify demurrage charges in advance for delays that are clearly the reponsibility of the customer". The implication is that the customer should not pay when he is not responsible. The Board do not explain how the haulier can make good the loss of use of his vehicles when, for example, they are held up at the docks.
Less cautious
The Board might well have been less cautious and suggested it as only reasonable that.the customer should pay demurrage as a matter of course for all delays except where the fault lay clearly with the haulier, or his driver or his vehicle. In the anxiety to teach hauliers a lesson the opportunity was lost in both of the Board's reports to examine in the round the whole problem of road transport delays.
Although only hauliers took part, the turn-that-lorry-round campaign during National Productivity Year applied equally to all commercial vehicles. The money that could be saved by cutting out delays was the same whether the firm employed a haulier or used its own vehicles. Quicker turn-round was not just a road haulage gimmick. It had an important place in any general plan for increasing productivity.
Evidence that this is now more widely appreciated was given during the more recent Quality and Reliability conference, the successor to National Productivity Year. For example, Mr. Fred Catherwood, director-general of the National Economic Development Council, in a general review at the conference emphasized that reliable and unimpeded delivery was an essential part of the production process. Apart from delays to export traffic, said Mr. Catherwood. "a tremendous amount of time is wasted in distribution of goods within Britain".
A proper demurrage scheme should be seen as part of a national plan for eliminating that waste.
Janus