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No quiet capitulation
Page 29
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Fr HERE are signs of growing rapport between road hauliers and the National Board for Prices and Incomes. This is a development to be welcomed—so long as the relationship is not carried too far.
The first two encounters between the Road Haulage Association and the Board will be remembered with some bitterness and a touch of humiliation by hauliers. They felt that, in asking for no more than their due in the form of better reward for their work, they were made to look grasping and unreasonable.
More recently, spokesmen for the PIB have asked for operators' advice and assistance in an understanding way, and have emphasized that the Board cannot sit isolated in the centre making remote judgments. This is good. Too many people unfamiliar with road transport, and road haulage in particular, fail to comprehend its special nature—and the diversity of its operations and problems.
Now the RHA has gone to the PIB—not cap in hand, but with reasoned evidence—to say that haulage rates must rise if the industry is to be able to conduct its business properly in its own and the national interest. We believe that hauliers have a very strong case and that they will be dealt with sympathetically.
But this is where the caution of our opening sentence comes in. Just because haulage rates have been chosen several times for reference to the Board, there must not be allowed to grow up an acceptance that the PIB is some sort of rates tribunal, governing the details of every future move in charges.
Such an organization was proposed just 30 years ago by an illustrious committee which suggested statutory rates committees, road rates tribunals, area rates officers and (whisper it, less Barbara hears) the observation of agreed rates as a licence condition. In a word: bureaucracy.
Events at the RHA conference suggested that there is no great love for fixed rates. But in any case this is a matter which must be argued openly—if at all—and not allowed to creep quietly in by the back door.