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Page 104
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Janus comments
FOR REASONS which hardly need to be spelled out the Government is increasingly anxious that the provisions of the Transport Bill should be accepted as the result of hard-headed commercial decisions. In the effort to establish the point Mr. Neil Carmichael, Joint Parliamentary Secretary, Ministry of Transport, seems to have taken on the role of official philosopher.
Last week he was speaking at the Management of Transport Workers Con ference. In the previous week his audience was gathered together by the Transport and General Workers Union. No doubt there will be other opportunities for him to put his point of view.
On each occasion his theme has been the same. The opponents of the Bill have alleged that its intention is by one means or another to featherbed the railways and that this is the wrong approach to the railway problem. They are mistaken, says Mr. Carmichael. Road and rail will be competing fairly. The criterion for judging by what means traffic should be carried will be purely commercial.
Mr. Carmichael is not the first to develop this argument and he is no more convincing than his predecessors. Quantity licensing presents him with a particularly difficult obstacle which, perhaps, it is impossible to overcome.
As has been said more than once the aim is to transfer to rail ICI per cent of the ton-mileage at present travelled by road operators. It is inconceivable that this would happen by the application of merely commercial criteria. Somewhere in the Bill there must be provision for the direction of the traffic by other means.
The procedure
This can only be through the procedure for granting special authorizations. Somewhere along the line a substantial number of hauliers and traders will find that much of the work they are now doing is no longer permitted to them. Unless this happens there is no point in quantity licensing. An elaborate system will have been set up to preserve the status quo.
Mr. Carmichael's main reply to this is the familiar one that many transport users have failed to appreciate that they would be better off with the railways. His strictures apply particularly to the C licence holder since it is hard to suppose that a trader is incapable of making the correct choice between the railways and a haulier.
There is no reason to suppose, says Mr. Carmichael, that "firms are more efficient in their transport decisions than in their other decisions or that transport industries are more efficient than other industries". Transport is an area of management "which in the past has all too often been neglected in calculations of profitability". It is rare to find firms "which have fully worked out the estimates required to confirm their modal choice and even more rare to find firms with a full comparative costing of their own C licence fleet and an outside haulier".
The point has some substance and it is an ominous approach to the subject. Small traders may have a shrewd idea of the comparative advantages of using their own vehicles, the railways or a haulier but they do not have readily available the statistics that would justify the final choice.
This does not mean that the choice is wrong. What emerges from Mr. Carmichael's latest statement is that even the trader who has guessed correctly will not get his special authorization if the proof is lacking. He is in the position of the examinee who finds the right answer but gets no marks unless the working is shown.
Any firm, says Mr. Carmichael, "who can present a reasoned case to the Licensing Authority in terms of its own profitability such as should convince its own board that it is efficient and financially conscious in its consideration of transport policy should be able to convince the Licensing Authority". One purpose of quantity licensing is "to help raise the standard of transport decision-making to that at present practised by the best firms".
Mr. Carmichael admits that the presentation of the case may not be simple. In a few cases computer techniques may be required. Many considerations have to be taken into account. The Bill specifically refers to cost, speed and reliability. Cost in this context is "all-embracing", says Mr. Carmichael. If the choice of one mode of transport involves a greater investment in stockpiling or interferes with other parts of the business "this is a cost of sending by that mode".
Where the choice falls on road transport another cost once the Bill becomes law will be incurred in collecting the evidence which will satisfy the Licensing Authority that the right choice has been made. The extent of the cost may be one of the reasons why the user has not undertaken it in the past.
Potent factor
There will be no such expense if he sends the traffic by rail. The saving of time, trouble and money which will thus be achieved may be a potent factor in persuading many thousands of operators, particularly those in a small way of business, not to apply for a special authorization or even to support an application by a haulier but to leave the railways to do their worst with the traffic.
Not unnaturally Mr. Carmichael puts it somewhat differently. The railways and the Government believe, he says, that when the "standard of transport decision making" is improved "more traffic will go by the railways than otherwise will be the case". The new licensing system "will present a method by which the strength of the railways' case can be tested".
As the Traders Road Transport Association and others have pointed out there are many other methods which could have been adopted. Some of them would have been fairer than the one-sided procedure in the Bill under which only the railways stand to gain. Mr. Carmichael has still not explained why this particular method was chosen.
Management objective
He is hard put to it to prove his claim that "commercialism or profitability" is the "overriding management objective" of the Bill. Less was said about these desirable criteria in the early stages in spite of his insistence that Mrs. Barbara Castle and Mr. Richard Marsh have "quite consistently and clearly explained them".
He admits a little ingenuously that "there is no one convenient place where you can find a complete account of them". This allows a good deal of scope to the seeker after truth. He may turn to the White Paper on the transport of freight where he will find that "the need to give some protection to the railways is still a valid objective of licensing". Alternatively he may read Mrs. Castle's introduction to the second reading of the Bill which she described as "practical Socialism", adding that the essential starting point was to integrate "and expand" the publicly owned road and rail services.
In contexts such as these neither commercialism nor profitability seem particularly relevant. Mr. Carmichael's anxiety to bring them to the centre of the stage is easily understood. He would like to persuade operators and transport management that their motives and those of the Government are identical.
He will have a hard task. The same difficulty is being found by the supporters of the Leber transport policy in the German Federal Republic. Professor Dr. Hellinuth St. Seidenfus, a European transport expert, has recently compared the terms of the Leber plan with the objectives claimed for it. The plan (which is steadily being watered down or otherwise modified in deference to the widespread protests) provides for drastic restrictions on long-distance road transport for the benefit of the railways.
The aims are said to include meeting public demand for economic transport, achieving the most economic division of function in the goods transport field, creating a transport network based on future demand and increasing transport safety.
Professor Seidenfus finds almost a total discrepancy between the actual proposals and their alleged purpose. The only comment he can make is that the programme "is not an economic but a political programme". Perhaps it is this kind of comment that Mr. Carmichael is desperately trying to evade.