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Froze thinking
Page 20
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Gordon Brown may have frozen duty on fuel, but hauliers say some thing more radical is needed. Dominic Perry reports.
Gordon Brown delivered his ninth Budget speech this week, offering numerous titbits for the voters in a fairly typical pre-election Budget.
However, while he may have been handing voting inducements to the elderly and working parents there were few crumbs of comfort for the transport industry.
Top of the list, as always, was fuel. Although the Chancellor has frozen fuel duty, which in a time of record oil prices is undoubtedly welcome, the fact is that it is only frozen until September. This means that six months down the road the industry will be going through precisely the same motions in order to make sure that the extra penny a litre isn't put onto the price of diesel.
RHA Chief Executive Roger King says: "We will now have to step up our efforts to persuade the Chancellor that if fuel duty is increased by 1.22p/lit on 1 September, we will be back to square one. "This simply cannot be allowed to happen: the current high levels of fuel duty literally represent make or break for many UK road hauliers."
Decouple industry
Once again Brown missed the opportunity to decouple the tax on fuel for essential users from the tax paid by car owners. Without that movement the haulage industry inevitably gets caught up in what is a tricky issue for the government —it cannot risk further fuelprotests so close to an election, but equally it does not want to be seen to be giving in too much to the transport lobby for fear of alienating 'green' voters.
It seems more than likely there will be no progress of this issue until 2008 when the LRUC is due for introduction. Brown did touch on the controversial tolling system in his speech, but only to say that draft legislation would be published in the spring.
An FTA spokesman notes:"The freeze in fuel duty was there to benefit the voters, not the transport industry. Until we have a separation between the two we will always be subject to the whims of the Chancellor."
He adds that it will continue lobbying to obtain a reduction in tax for essential users before 2008.
The only other major announcement was the appointment of former British Airways chief executive Rod Eddington as (another) transport czar to "advise on the impact of transport decisions on the UK's productivity, stability, and growth and on longer term priorities".
This has been greeted with distinctly lukewarm enthusiasm by the FTA. Chief executive Richard Turner expressed his frustration with consummate courtesy:"While we welcome the opportunity to look at transport from an industry perspective, it is difficult to see what more Mr Eddington can bring to the party.
Urgent need
"He seems to be being asked to look at what industry might need at some indeterminate time in the future.
"However, the whole of UK industry is wrestling with the weaknesses of our transport system here and now.We need urgent and increased investment in our roads infrastructure." •