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Time for a new rates policy by Janus
FEW if any announcements of increases in road haulage rates were made during August. Partly responsible may have been the absence on holiday of some of the people with whom it would have been necessary to negotiate.
Hauliers have not forgotten the subject. They have just been told that the next round of the Road Haulage Association's costs and productivity scheme has begun with the dispatch to participating members of a questionnaire designed to bring the charting of cost changes up to the end of January last.
The lull in rates demands cannot continue indefinitely. There are indications that costs are still rising and that more increases are threatened. The RUA has assessed at £500,000 the extra cost to members of the proposed higher postal charges. Official sanction cannot long be delayed for the substantial increase to £16 1 Os in the legal minimum weekly wage for drivers. Rises are forecast in the price of fuel and other items essential to the running of vehicles.
wHAT the temporary respite may provide is the opportunity to examine new policies to deal with the perennial problem of costs and charges. The present lack of policy is unsatisfactory. If nothing is done there will soon recur the constant sputtering of announcements from various groups of operators that they are about to put up their rates by amounts which usually lie somewhere between 5 and 15 per cent.
The date of implementation varies, as do the reasons. There is no convenient way of bringing the claims under national or official scrutiny, and this may be why hauliers have deliberately fragmented their approach to trade and industry. When the increases cover different periods and are attributable to so many different items of costs the tangle becomes too great to unravel.
Harmonization may not be essential, however dear it is to the Eurocrats who have invented the word. If a group of operators can establish a fair rate through their own efforts, it is to their credit. The main sufferers are the many operators who for certain reasons find it difficult to band together and have no organization to help them.
FOR many years there was at least one means of support. Although the RHA. rates recommendations were never the magic formula that was sometimes suggested, they gave the individual operator as well as groups of hauliers the excuse to start a discussion on rates with his customers. If he did not grasp the opportunity it was his own fault.
A good deal of help is still available. From time to time the RHA sends letters to every member drawing attention to the way in which costs are rising and urging him to reflect the changes in his rates. There is also the costs scheme which for the first time provides from an independent and trustworthy source a general picture of what has happened and even of what will happen.
Hauliers are not altogether satisfied. The scheme is too fine an instrument for the blunt and crude purpose that they have in mind. They may have to meet their customers as militants and they need a specific single figure to inscribe on their banner. It is after this first step that the bargaining begins, and it is often the first step that counts.
GENERALIZED exhortations have the same defect in the opinion of operators. There is nothing like the bold and unqualified announcement for bringing the customer to the bargaining table in the right frame of mind. The miscellaneous announcements over the past two or three years have at least one thing in common. They state unequivocally the amount of the rates increase that is demanded or in some cases is even being imposed.
Across any hopes of a return to a similarly bold national policy there still lies the shadow of the Prices and Incomes Board. Whatever happened, it is doubtful whether the Government would again ask the Board to examine road haulage charges as a whole; but it would make for severe political difficulties if, for example, the RHA took advantage of the presumed tolerance of the new Government in order to take action that the previous Government had successfully outlawed.
There remains the uneasy feeling, which has never been completely dispelled, that the previous Government was bluffing. In its notorious reports on road haulage the Board was condemning, not a genuine price increase, but merely a recommendation of a figure by which prices might rise.
No customers had complained. They were using the services of hauliers, not of the RHA. Until a haulier came to them with a request for a higher rate they had no need to take action. Even then it was entirely in their own hands whether or not they agrf to the request, either wholly or in part. they thought the demand unjustified, thi were always other hauliers available.
FROM the point of view of hauliers,I customer held all the cards. In the I: resort there was no way of compelli him to pay more. If his resistance -st unreasonable he had to reckon with 1 consequences only if his usual haulier VP out of business or was for other reasons I there to serve .him and nobody else seem willing to carry the traffic.
There has been speculation about wl would have happened had the RHA ignoi the Board's warning that blanket ra recommendations should no longer given. To give advice, even if the advice deemed irresponsible, is hardly a hangi matter. The possible victims might ha been the hauliers who took the advice. B so long as the customer was prepared pay the higher rate, the intervention of 1 Board would be superfluous; and where was not prepared, the remedy was sing He refused to pay.
0 PERATORS and their custom have become more sophistical Apart from the possible unfortunl repercussions there is no observal inclination on the part of the RHA to 1 the clock back five or six years and reit to the practice of general ra1 recommendations. It is too clean recognized that the incidence of costs var and that a continual pretence to ignore t fundamental fact must increasingly discre whatever statements are made.
The Board therefore has finally made point although it could, possibly w advantage, have gone about the task I cavalierly. It realized that some replacemi might be needed for what it had taken aw. Its alternative was a comparative study costs similar to the one now bei undertaken by the RBA.
This may not be sufficient for purposes. To keep the cost investigati manageable it has had to exclude cert; types of operation and even operati whom it may be thought to cover, fl difficulty in relating the published details their own business. They are thrown ba upon the old method of agreement by group to apply what seems a plausi figure.
IF this ritual is still obligatory it would better performed nationally. At le some order would be introduc Regular announcements could be made a cost changes between announcements coi be plotted in an orderly way.
Statements might be concerned with cc rather than actual rates. The considera body of information now accumulai should make it possible to assess with f accuracy the total expenditure by operat■ in a year and to compare it with the to for the following year. The comparis between the two figures would provide authentic guide without being recommendation.