Govt wasters: RHA
Page 19
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I Haulage Association national chairman Ken Rogers last week an accusing finger at high-spending Government depart
se departments comprewely failed to cut their exlure last year, which is a cause of the road haulage try's decline — a decline -toted by the Budget, ad Mr Rogers at the RHA rn Area annual dinner.
e hear reports of overman-)nd wasteful bureaucracies public sector and we have it to ask when the rate of nriing in the public sector etch up with the rate of deing in our own.
"I understand that the public sector has been losing employment at the rate of only five per cent in the recent past, whereas we have suffered a rate of ten per cent and worse.
"Another complaint I hear is that hauliers are being taken for granted and treated as unpaid tax collectors, supplementing those already in the civil service. The problem today is a generalised assumption by the Government that it can raise our taxation almost at will, confident that
much of this burden. will be passed on to the customer and the public."
Mr Rogers believes this is very dangerous attitude: "We must make it clear that the Government's reluctance to cut its own staff, its willingness to use us for its own revenue-raising purposes, and its apparent indifference to the catastrophic decline of our industry must be reversed with all speed."
Mr Rogers also claimed in Bristol that the current civil servants' industrial action in pursuit of a pay claim is inconveniencing RHA members. Bankrupt hauliers and unemployed drivers have little sympathy for protesting civil servants, he said.
Mr Rogers said that Sir Geoffrey Howe is responsible for most of the increases in operating costs during the first quarter of this year.