TML with care Britain has accepted the EEC directive which
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calls for controls on admission to the profession of road haulage before January, 1978. The proposals just circulated to interested bodies by the Department of the Environment, and summarised on page 2, reveal some of the very tricky points which will have to be resolved if the resulting regulations are not to create a host of anomalies and damage road haulage flexibility.
Believing— like ourselves— that statutory examination schemes are likely to prove wasteful and bureaucratic, the FTA has quickly rejected the inclusion of own-account managers. On the other hand, the list of subjects which the EEC suggests operators should know seems unexceptionable, and even the commercial requirements might prove useful to own-account men as well as hauliers.
Our fears are directed not so much at the content as the method. Improving professionalism in road transport is a laudable aim, and hauliers see this system as a means of eliminating the cowboy element. But the signs are that if they swallow the DoE's broadened proposals they will wake up in 1978 to find themselves enmeshed in a heavyhanded and inflexible bureaucracy that frightens off desirable entrepreneurs and innovators and knocks much of the enterprising spirit out of this lively, individualistic industry. These proposals demand the most searching scrutiny.