Did Foster chicken out?
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In bending over backwards to avoid political controversy, the Foster Committee on licensing has been inconsistent. Its recommendation "that the Government should resist as impracticable and misguided introducing quantity licensing" is vitiated by the sections of the Transport Act, 1968, on special authorisation.
Elsewhere in the report the repeal of the Act's innocuous provisions on transport managers' licences is recommended but there is no suggestion of the withdrawal of the sections, at present dormant but in complete conflict with the Foster findings, requiring vehicles over 16 tons gross and carrying goods more than 100 miles to be subject to rigorous proof of need and restriction on their numbers. The committee's failure to take its proposal to an effective conclusion is curious.
The Geddes report of 1965, on which the 1968 licensing system was largely based, also recommended "the abolition of all restrictions on the capacity of the road haulage industry and on the work for which a lorry may be used." That advice did not inhibit a Labour Government in enacting the provisions on special authorisation, so perhaps Prof Christopher Foster decided that discretion was the better part of logic.