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TAKING ROAD PASSENGERS FOI
Page 62
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THE Government is clearly concerned about its image. Like a young girl before a mirror it is titivating itself as best it can for the next general election. Then it hopes to be asked, bymore suitors than before, to take the floor again. One of the blemishes it is trying to cover with cosmetics is the 6d. a gallon on motor fuel. A tax of this kind, easy though it is to impose and collect, cannot fail to raise costs directly for passenger and goods transport and indirectly throughout the whole economy.
• Perhaps equally as important is its effect on an incomes policy. On prices generally, the effect may be veiled and delayed, but on bus fares it could only have been naked and immediate. Hence the Government's promise to relieve stage carriage services of the additional tax. To have forced up bus fares, a cost-ofliving cornerstone, just when Ministers were supposed to be working 'overtime to create a climate of price stability would have been decidedly unpopular. The image would surely have suffered.
It may suffer still. Many people unaccustomed to reading Ministerial statements with the care they deserve have assumed that stage fares have been pegged. The assumption is quite wrong, of course; but resentment among passengers will not be lessened when the falsity is revealed. For, unless some hitherto unknown magic formula is soon unearthed, fares are bound to go up once again to cover increased operating costs including the substantial extra charge for
insurance stamps which the same Budget imposed.
Municipal bus undertakings have been living hand to mouth for the past 15 years. Most of their financial reserves went long ago. Their only course now, when the inflationary shoe begins again to pinch (as it is already starting to do) and the expected pressure for extended concessionary fares builds up irresistibly in consequence of the passing of the new Concessionary Fares Act, will be either to make further applications to raise fares or to go on the dole locally through rate aid.
Members of some operating municipalities will welcome rate aid. To them subsidized transport, far from carrying a stigma, merits applause; and giving away other people's money is always a pleasanter pastime than the tiresome business of trying to make books balance.
Others, however, will feel less beneficient. They will remember that most if not all the 90-odd municipal undertakings