Cabotage:
Page 6
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
• The threat of Continental hauliers competing for UK domestic traffic from the beginning of next year has been quashed with the news that EEC plans to allow greater domestic and international haulage freedom have been shelved.
Cabotage — the practice which allows foreign operators to carry domestic backloads within fellow EEC states while on international journeys — was due to come into effect on January 1 1987.
However, EEC Commission officials are now privately admitting that there is still too much work to be done and cabotage will not come in on the planned date.
These admissions have been given extra weight by recent objections by Euro MPs and several European governments. The European Parliament Transport Committee has pushed through a number of amendments which effectively postpone the starting date for cabotage.
Although the committee only advises on policy, it says that, in order to avoid serious disruption, full freedom of competition must be introduced gradually along with the harmonisation of vehicle weights, as well as fuel taxes and other costs.
The Road Haulage Association has welcomed the Transport Committee's recommendation to postpone the introduction of cabotage. RHA international executive Bob Duffy says that cabotage may not be implemented until 1992 — when the EEC has decided there must be a free international transport market.
A British official in Brussels also told CM: "We will give priority instead to the development of a free international market by 1992."
UK hauliers have generally feared the prospect of foreign operators competing for domestic traffic which could push profits down. British TIR operators have also been concerned that they might encounter difficulties in other member states if cabotage is introduced.
However, the Freight Transport Association — whose members stand to gain the most from cabotage — says that the EEC Commission will still be pressurising the EEC transport ministers to accept cabotage as soon as possible.
The Commission says cabotage is in line with the establishment of a European transport market and will reduce the number of unladen journeys made by all operators.
The FTA's transport user services director Jack Welsh says that UK transport minister John Moore (who is the EEC transport ministers' president until the end of the year) will also be pushing for the quickest possible introduction of cabotage.
However, Germany has taken a different line. This month Chancellor Helmut Kohl told the German hauliers' trade association, BDF, that harmonisation and liberalisation must go hand in hand. France