Industry under pressure
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If the Government keeps its nerve and maintains its objections to the proposed advisory council on heavy vehicle movement, the road freight industry will have been spared the imposition of a monstrous bureaucratic straitjacket. Until last Friday's Commons debate on the Heavy Commercial Vehicle (Control and Regulations) Bill, introduced by Mr Dykes, it had seemed as though the Government had decided to bow to the all-party pressure for lorry control and allow the Bill to pass unchallenged into law. But fortunately the view, strongly held by some in the Department of the Environment, that this measure would duplicate the powers of the local and county authorities, was allowed to become the basis on which the DoE spokesman in the Commons expressed "the most severe reservations".
The Government's reservations are well founded. One of the fundamental tasks of the new, more powerful county authorities will be to produce transport and traffic control plans for their areas. To superimpose a duplicated lorrycontrol system on this, in the form of a national board, would be to give central authority a grip on local events which flies in the face of the whole policy of local government reorganization. It would also threaten transport operators with a remote, and probably inflexible, route-fixing body out of touch with local needs.
Despite Government doubts, Mr Dykes' Bill has been given a Second Reading without amendment, and the main hope for alteration lies in the forthcoming committee stage. More than that, it seems, cannot be expected now. No-one who reads the account of Fridays debate can doubt that there is very strong support for some such measure: or indeed that the hitherto fairly general criticisms of road transport are now being formalized as restrictive measures or plans. Operators should be in no doubt that road transport is, however unfairly, under very heavy pressure.