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BASES: FRANKNESS PAYS
Page 46
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But what exactly IS an 'operating centre'?
BRITISH Railways, like the British Government, have discovered that it is easier to contemplate reorganization of bases than to put the process into practice. For their Freightliner operations they want large numbers of additional articulated vehicles, strategically based. As a first move in their campaign they have applied in many traffic areas for the necessary A licences. Their adversaries have reacted vigorously. A barrage of objections from Road hauliers has been directed at them.
In most of the licensing court battles BR have achieved their objectives. Here and there they have lost a few vehicles; but in the main they have triumphed. But what of the appeals against these grants?
One of the sternest engagements before the Transport Tribunal related to the North West, on an appeal sponsored by the RHA in respect of vehicles which were to be based at the Longsight (Manchester) Freightliner depot. (Longsight is within the city of Manchester, but on its outskirts—some two or three miles from the centre.) According to the advocate for the appellant hauliers, BR's main Manchester licence was a consolidated one authorizing 931 vehicles and 866 trailers on an A licence with a number of bases. Section 171(2) of the 1960 Act, he said, required a separate application to be made for each operating centre, although a licence could cover several such centres. Because a separate application had not been lodged, he argued that BR were out of order and that the licence which had been granted ought to be annulled.
Section 171(2) reads:—
Where the applicant for an A or a B licence has more than one operating centre he shall make a separate application in respect of each centre, but where applications for licences of the same class are made by the same person in respect of two or more centres the Licensing Authority may, if he thinks fit, grant a single licence in respect of all or any of the applications.
The old Act (the parent Act of 1933) never used the expression "operating centre". The term then was "base or centre". Only after the nationalizing Act of 1947 was "operating centres" coined. Not that the change in wording was intended to change the law. There were arguments just as lively about the original expression as there have been about its successor.
What exactly is a base or operating centre? The most authoritative pronouncement which has ever been made on the subject says this:—
(1) A permanent base or centre must be a place from which the vehicles are controlled or are physically operated. It does not mean the place from and to which vehicles normally start and return.
(ii) The nature of a base or centre is affected by the size, type and method of administration of the business, e.g. the control office may be the operator's home or an ordinary office; or vehicles may be kept in a garage or a yard or on a site in the open. A base need not be a building, but should consist of premises identifiable as an address; it should not be the name of a town or an area.
The base or centre must be related to traffic in the sense that a Licensing Authority would not be right in granting a licence from a 'base or centre except where need is shown for the facility to be provided in relation to that base or centre. The question how near the work should be to a base or centre must depend upon the locality, the nature of the work and the size of the fleet.
(iv) If a fleet or part thereof is kept at a place at a distance from the control office or centre, either place may be the base. More than one base is not allowable except where vehicles are scattered or distributed for the purpose of being in the locality of their work.
The first real skirmish over bases occurred as long ago as 1936, in the case of O'Sullivan v. Gt. Western Rly. Co. The old base was at Port Talbot, the new one at Newport, Mon. is some 40 or 50 miles distant by road. The LA refused Mr. O'Sullivan's application for a new licence because there had also been a complete change in the business. The subsequent appeal was dismissed. A couple of years later another case cropped up (S. W. Turrell v. LNER Co.). Part of the heading to that appeal decision sufficiently explains the findings: "A change of base by itself is not necessarily such a material change of circumstances as should disqualify an applicant for a licence for a further currency period . . . But a change of the area of normal user may be such a material change".
That dictum has stood the• test of time. But the path which so many applicants continue wrongly to take lies not in that direction at all. It is in the thicket of takeovers—the purchases of haulage businesses during the currency of a licence—that applicants so often lose their way. Here the ground is strewn with good intentions and blasted hopes. In the field of appeals alone (and how many of these failures never reach the appeal stage?) dozens of cases could be cited. With slight variation in details, they mostly have one thing in common: a change of base not disclosed at the proper time, either through ignorance of licensing requirements or' the mistaken idea tat frankness may not pay. The more recent examples given below show the sort of snags against which takeover applicants should guard.