How to tackle rating and storage rates
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• Some of the complexities arising from recent planning and land legislation were unravelled by Mr. I. R. Toms—the Association's honorary surveyor—at the annual conference of the National Association of Warehouse Keepers at Bournemouth on Tuesday.
Other conference speakers included Mr. Peter Stephenson, whose subject was "Britain and the Common Market—the effect on public warehousing": Mr. R. J. Miller, who spoke on "Quotations for handling and storage"; and Mr. T. E. Tindall, whose subject was ''The progress of the Road Transport Industry Training Board".
Mr. Toms said that revaluation for rating purposes should be every five years but the current assessments based on the 1963 roll for England and Wales would probably remain in force until 1972 /3. Rating assessment was an art rather than a science and it was possible to contest an assessment under a clause in the 1965 Act. If the assessment was out of line with comparable properties reductions were sometimes achieved.
When a rent return fell due, in preparation for the 1972 census, Mr. Toms urged that members should not complete details on the reverse of the form defining what had been spent on the property. But valuation officers should not be frustrated in their physical check of the property. He thought it probable that conversion to the metric system would bring arithmetical errors in the next rating assessments.
Explaining changes under sections 17 and 18 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1968, Mr. Toms said it was possible for warehouses keepers and others to apply for a certificate of existing use; if this were 'granted now, no planning authority would be able to extinguish that right of use, in the future. Even if it were refused, there was a right of appeal to the Minister, but Mr. Toms suggested that it would be necessary to prove that an existing use had been operative continuously since December 31, 1963.
Mr. Stephenson believed that joining the Common Market would produce a relatively higher circulation of goods, to the benefit of transport warehousing. Transport would become relatively more important than manufacturing and he foresaw a trend towards a United States pattern, with much more use of specialized distributors and the development of the field warehousing concept in a marketing area five times bigger than in the UK.
Mr. Miller, speaking on handling and storage quotations, said that current rates were often based on port and rail rates of long ago. Warehouse operators still tended to base rates on the amount by which they could undercut, say, port authorities and still make a profit.
Rates yardsticks had to be accurate, said Mr. Miller, and must reflect the ease or difficulty of handling particular commodities. Also the packaging, weight, size, and whether palletized, were important factors. The number of marks, sizes, separations and so on for other services necessary in the course of warehousing should be considered.
The method of delivery—for example, by containers—could also affect costs. New packaging methods for Australian canned goods meant that pallets could be stored only two high and not three or four high as in the past.
Having established packaging, size, weight and any exclusions, the rate should be expressed clearly as a rate per ton per week, or per package per week and so on. If the handling rent included a period of free-rent, the quotation must make this clear. Again, if labelling a shrink wrapping were called for, this must be included in the quotation.
In the final session, on Wednesday, Mr. T. E. Tindall, director-general of the Road Transport industry Training Board gave a progress report on the Board. The number of trainees in the road transport industry as a whole had increased from 102,679 in 1967 /8 to 123,381 in 1968/69. Days on "off-the-job" training increased from 423,378 to 570,599 but "on-the-job" training days fell slightly—some evidence of an increase in the quality of training provided with less loss of productive time.
The • present training position in warehousing was unsatisfactory, said Mr. Tindall. Only 30 of 255 managers were shown as being trained—and this could merely mean attendance, at a single one-day course. Only 50 of 755 clerical staff were shown as having received training and in the group categories comprising foremen, craftsmen and commercial staff, only 20 of 629 people were currently being trained. Overall l2 per cent of warehousing staff were getting some sort of training, compared with an industry-wide figure of 25 per cent.
Concluding, Mr. Tindall said that 20 years ago a cross-section of school leavers would have shown an almost complete range of intelligence abilities, skills and motivation. Today, with the creaming-off process of higher education this was no longer true. It was important that the road transport industry should recruit from a: cross-section of educational backgrounds, not necessarily because people were better for a university education—even, perhaps, despite this—but because recruiters must look to the sources available. In its first year of operation the Board could only find evidence of 13 young roan joining the industry with this kind of background.