Tough times, tough line
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Members call for more insistent attitude
BOB BECKHAM, Freight Transport Association president, told the Association's annual conference, at Eastbourne this week, that responding to pressures from members the FTA was taking a more insistent line on the f011owing matters: The Dykes Act; road and rail investment; port nationalisation; the dockworker scheme.
Mr Beckham said it was no longer possible to ask whether a question was desirable; a more imperative question in 1975 was: Can the country afford it?
Mr Beckham criticised the false image aroused by the Dykes Act and hit at the con2ept of lorry routeing.
The FTA, he said, had not found it too difficult to persuade local authorities of the " quack " nature of the trafficfree zone medicinal cure. OutSide the obvious pedestrian precincts, the only way to abolish the lorry from an 'entire area Was to do without the goods and services brought by lorries—and that meant everything the population needed for daily living.
Welcoming the Minister for Transport, Dr Gilbert, to the conference, Mr Beckham said be was not to be envied in his appointment at this particular time, but the Minister had the FlCA's good wishes and would receive wholehearted support for realistic policies.
On the domestic front, the FTA had completed a major reorganisation and had purchased its own premises at Tunbridge Wells, steps improving the financial viability of the Association.
In a reference to his participation in a conference of local authority representatives convened 'by the DoE earlier this year to discuss implementation of the Dykes Act, Mr Beckham said the unmistakable message coming back from the floor, from the local authorities, was to "cool it "—to cool the excessive zeal engendered by the Dykes Act to restrict the lorry in the exClusive interests of environmental improvement.
Today, partly as a result of the changed economic situation, there was a recognition that the Dykes Act, at its face value, was seriously misleading. In essence, it conferred no new powers on local authori'ties, but it committed them to a new responsibility—to draw • up and submit comprehensive plans for lorry control by 1977. It held out to an eager section of the public an image of a national network of lorry routes which would syphon off all heavy lorries from the places where they were customarily on view; and it presented a dream of large geographical zones which would be lorry4ree, since everything over 3 tons, through traffic and access vehicles alike, would be banned.
While the FTA would support the concept of lorry management set out in the brochure Planning for Lorries, it was necessary to stress that the Dykes Act in general, and 'the concept of lorry routes in particular, had raised false hopes in a section of the public eager for action. " In this, as in bigger issues, I have a feeling that in this country we prefer the plain, unvarnished truth to a gloss PR package, which promises much but delivers little."
The heart of any lorry routeing programme, said the president, was the road programme. With an adequate road network, there was no problem in keeping heavy through-lorries to appropriate roads, with or without a formalised routeing system. Without the roads there was absolutely no hope.
"I wonder," said Mr Beckham, "if the vocal minorities whose veices tend to dominate in these matters really understand, or care, about the savage price they are exacting from their less fortunate neighbours who are deprived of the relief that good roads can bring. Or, indeed, whether they realise the cumulative effect of their actions ; which is to deprive this country of one of the fundamental requirements upon which its future must be built."
Turning to railways, "those classic examples of inflexibly designated routes, thought of as a genuine alternative to road by those who do not understand, or do not want to understand, the facts of transport life." Many FTA members, said Mr Beckham, were regular users of railways and members as a whole provided the whole of the railways' freight. Some members would face considerable difficulties without rail services. So the accusation that the FTA was a road lobby, and by inference anti-rail, was simply not true.
But facts had to be faced. There were 200,000 miles of roads and only 12,000 miles of rail. The roads connected directly to half-a-million shops, 140,000 pubs and hotels, 37,000 petrol stations and every single factory and warehouse. The railways connected directly to a mere handful. Roads carried about 90 per cent of the nation's freight; the railways only 10 per cent.
Britain's transport system was primarily a road system, with the railways as the fixed link division of the total transport complex. "Any student of accounting," said Mr Beckham, "will tell you that a fixed cost is an uncontrollable cost—so long as it remains unchanged."
All this suggested that there was a rod problem, but not a road problem. The Germans, said the president, fell into the trap of confusing the two, and tried to achieve rail viability by restrictions on road traffic. They ended up with an annual rail deficit of £2,000 million ! Of course, the Germans now realised their mistake and were cutting back.
A second FTA objective was to ensure that State support for British Rail did not mean less money being spent on roads, as it undoubtedly had in recent years. The FTA did not want to argue for or against passenger subsidies paid to the railways. But if every £1 of subsidy involved £1 less in productive investment in the country's communication system it was high time the process was changed. Subsidies contributed nothing to the country's future prosperity; productive investment was a vital national need. Our priorities were upside down if we were prepared to neglect urgently needed investment in order to give priority to subsidy.
Few transport operators, said Mr Beckham, could be unaware of the EEC regulation 543/69, dealing with drivers' hours and tachographs. It could hardly be otherwise when a total bill of £650 million was involved. Once again, it was a question of what could be afforded.
In view of Brussels discussions, it would be unnecessarily stupid to change to one set of rules now, only to have to change again in 1977 when the revisions were agreed. There was the real threat of major industrial strife if an attempt was made to enforce tachographs in the face of trade union hostility.
Hence the FTA's vigorous campaign for a deferment of both sets of regulations. It was greatly to the credit of the Minister that he took the decision to go to Brussels to seek such a deferment. What worried the FTA was what would follow the Brussels verdict? What would happen if, perchance, the EEC proved intractable? Mr Beckham hoped the Minister would not be involved in a dawn to dusk discussion on December 31, as were Agricultural Ministers, almost as an annual event!
Other aspects of EEC transport policy were touched on by the president. He•felt the FTA could take the lion's share of the credit for the virtual deathknell of the stultifying bracket tariff system, and they wel corned the Commission's proposals for a complete change in direction of the Common Transport Policy, involving the abandonment of quotas and capacity controls in favour of liberal trade and transport policies.
Mr Beckham critised the "insipid certificate" implicit in the access to the profession proposals of the EEC. On lorry weights he urged reconsideration of 40-tonners, and he wanted government action to minimise the impact of higher fuel costs on the industry. little discretion about policy, which was set out—or supposed to be set out—by Parliament. That was not Continental practice and the "breath of fresh air" that the change in European directions would bring to lawyers could be salutary, though it would alarm managers used to specific and definite details of contract and regulation.
Current legislation was providing new institutions with very wide discretion about what they did and (more importantly) decide that other people ought to do. The Health and Safety Executive, the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service, the Manpower SErvices Commission and its Training Services Agency, and to a lesser extent the research unit on quality of working life, all had unprecedented discretion to set standards in their fields, and the HSE, the ACAS and the TSA had considerable powers to impose them. The HSE's inspectors, for example, had powers to take action first and put the onus of appeal to law on the person acted against, instead of the other way round.
These new laws, said the Professor, imposed general duties on employers—for most of the time on managers—towards their employees, in contrast to the traditional terms of specific contracts subject to a mixture of Parliamentary enactments and collective bargaining. All this was seasoned by the characteristically British and peculiarly difficult concept of "custom and practice."
The practical effect of this trend was that employers, having been used to the power of well developed trade unions, must now have regard to the law and institutions also standing up for employees.
On the "Statutory Floor" for Individuals Prof Macbeath noted that the common law had always held that a contract of employment subsisted even when not explicit, and industrial tribunals sometimes had to determine for the parties what the contract was. It was only since 1959 that statute law had evolved some clarity and since 1963 the statutory floor had mostly been extended to deal with the terms on which people left employment. Minimum periods of notice began in 1963, redundancy payments in 1965 and compensation for unfair dismissal in 1971. The process of extension was now moving forward rapidly, especially with the Employment Protection Bill.
When the current cycle of legislation was completed there would be nine new statutory rights for any individual employee, although one was for women only—the right to maternity leave and reinstatement afterwards. The other rights were : the right to equal pay for work of equal value; the right to healthy and safe conditions and to participation in establishing them (with a concomitant responsibility); the right to written information about discipline, procedures, job titles and pay; the right to guaranteed minimum pay when work falls off; the right to suspension from work on medical grounds; the right to belong to an independent trade union; the right to time off for trade union duties, looking for work and arranging for training while under notice and (without pay) for wider trade union activities and performing public duties.
It was yet to be determined, he said, whether the collective right to work only with fellow trade unionists would become. a statutory right. It was a fact that the closed shop was a remarkably durable institution' which survived the Industrial Relations Act virtually unscathed.
Discussing the Rights of Collectives the Professor said the key principle of legislation was "encouraging the extension of collective bargaining " and this had been shrewdly described as "asking for what no one has asked before and getting it for everyone." Industrial democracy, possibly extending to the boardroom, was a subject of extreme political delicacy and an attractive area for speculation, in Britain and Europe. Changes might be called for in company law to accommodate the distribution of power and accountability.
In a comment on the effect of the Sex Discrimination Bill, Prof Macbeath said its general relevance to freight transport would take time to show, but the right of liberated women to drive long-distance lorries would attract much attention when some harried transport manager faced a dispute about it!