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Time to call a halt
Page 43
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Just about every 10 miles that a heavy goods vehicle travels costs 4s bd in fuel tax alone, and the total fuel tax and excise duty which operators of commercial vehicles in this country pay every year now amounts to a staggering £500m. This is the situation which has been reached following six increases in fuel tax in the past five years and an increase in licence duty of as much as 125 per cent. Although industrial and operator associations have protested regularly each year at the growing burden of this tax impost, there has not been quite the sustained campaign which the bus industry mounted, with considerable success.
Because bus passengers vote with their feet, as well as with ballot papers in Local and General elections, there have been strong social and political forces behind the granting of rebates for bus services; but this discrimination, while welcomed by p.s.v. operators, is still a fundamentally irrational one. There is no basic reason why carriage of people should be regarded nationally as more deserving of financial help than the carriage of the food they eat, the clothes they wear and the goods which they need for their daily lives.
Now the president of the Freight Transport Association has spoken out clearly and strongly in favour of some method of insulating goods transport from the full effects of Exchequer demands. His main concern is, rightly, the burden on industry; and this is not merely a matter of passing costs on to the domestic consumer in order to soak up spending power, but is becoming a serious addition to the industrial cost of our exports. There is another aspect, too. The discriminatory charges on heavy lorries proposed in the original Transport Bill were abandoned, but only because at least as much was to be raised through a Budget increase in road taxes. Since then the haulage charges have, in effect, been imposed several times over in the form of fuel and licence duties, so that the cost situation in road transport has been tremendously inflated compared with rail, which still enjoys virtually untaxed fuel. There are more subtle ways than introducing quantity licensing to give the railways an advantage in competing for freight.
A door opens?
Whatever the political effects of President de Gaulle's loss of office, most of British industry will hope that one result will be the chance of British entry into the European Economic Community. Even with the present tariff barriers, Britain sold over 8,000 commercial vehicles in the EEC countries last year; but some idea of the potential in a free market is shown by our sales of over 22,000 commercial vehicles in the countries of our partners in EFTA.
This issue of Commercial Motor shows the tremendous range of qualityengineered goods and passenger vehicles which Great Britain can offer; and last year we exported 140,405 commercial vehicles and chassis, earning over £116m, the latter being the world's highest figure for commercial vehicle sales value in 1968.
This year the prospects are even brighter; and with new freedom to sell in the highly industrialized countries of Western Europe, the sky would be the limit.