Haulage image building campaign was 'a failure'
Page 7
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by Miles Brignall
• The Lorries, Your Lifeline campaign, set up by hauliers more than year ago to clean up the image of the truck, has been described as a miserable failure.
A succession of speakers at the Freight Transport Association's national conference last week called on the industry to launch a public relations offensive. Sir Bernard Ingham, former press secretary to Baroness Thatcher, told the conference the industry must explain to the public that many of the recent improvements in the standard of living have been brought about on the back of the haulage industry.
The debate has become more intense as environmental groups and the anti-road lobby have adopted an increasingly professional approach to PR. Environmentalist David Bellamy told FTA delegates that the truck is seen as the enemy by many of the people protesting at road projects.
A number of speakers warned that the haulage industry has been slow to respond and has suffered accordingly.
But Dr Wolfgang Hager of the European Centre for Infrastructure Studies said the future lies with Government spending on developing rail and road networks: not with simple image manipulation.
1 See pages 4 and 8 for more news from the FTA conference.