Orders of the Day — Transport Commission (Annual Report)

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 22 July 1952.

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Photo of Mr Enoch Powell Mr Enoch Powell , Wolverhampton South West 12:00, 22 July 1952

I will read it in English. There is no question … of forcing the customer away from road to rail. … All the Commission ask is that the customer shall pay the real cost of the services he selects, and that he shall not receive one service at its bare cost if he insists at the same time on the maintenance of other services at less than cost. Though, in the present state of the country's financial and economic position, it is difficult to establish what the true long-term cost of different forms of transport will be, it is of vital importance ultimately that the true costs of the various services shall be brought home to the customer. I think it would be difficult to better that statement of the essential importance of a charges scheme to the whole question of transport. Yet we find that when we turn from the theory, the professed theory, to reality, there is an extraordinary gulf. A charges scheme, and a complete charges scheme was, in the view of the Minister, to have been presented within two years of the Act coming into force. That two years was extended to four years; the four years was extended to six years, and at the latest stage of which we have knowledge there is no real evidence that the Commission are further forward in the production of a sound and practical scheme than they were at the beginning.

There is a document called "Draft Outline of Principles Proposed to be Embodied in a Charges Scheme" which was published by the Transport Commission at the end of 1949. In looking at it I was reminded of those Chinese boxes which are sometimes given to children and which, to their disappointment, are found to contain, as they are examined, one box within another, and within another; until in the end all one gets out of it is just a box. When I examined this draft outline to see what the principles were to be I read through until I got to this paragraph. It is headed, "Classification of Regulations and Instructions" and this is what are the principles: The new classification obviously requires regulations which, as far as practicable, will be applicable to all services of the B.T.C. The draft Regulations which it is proposed to apply will he issued later. But the Commission have from time to time given a clue as to the difficulties which they are encountering, and those difficulties, I believe, do lead us somewhere near the heart of this problem. Last year in their third Report, they said: It is impossible that any such scheme can at present lay down a detailed basis for road haulage rates and charges. Already therefore, nearly two years ago, they found themselves unable to cope with what was the underlying professed object, a co-ordinated scheme of charges which would bring road and rail charges into relationship. And this year, in their fourth Report, they say: Only slow progress has been made with the difficult matter of rationalising the basis and mechanics of fixing fares and freight charges. Why, then, have the Commission found it so difficult, difficult to the degree of impossibility, to do that which they themselves, and the fathers of the Act, realised was the essence and the key to the whole matter? It is because they were being asked to fill the jar of the Danaids, or, in the words of the Amendment moved by my right hon. Friend, that they had been entrusted with an impossible task.

The impossibility was that they were trying to reconcile two principles which within the structure of a universal state monopoly, are irreconcilable. The first principle is that which I have already quoted, the principle of charges based in general upon costs. But there is another principle. To that also the right hon. Member for East Ham, South made reference in his Second Reading speech at the end of 1946: The Commissioners have had to carry through the task of integrating all forms of transport carried by the Bill and—this I would particularly emphasise—to see that all parts of the country are adequately served … It is only by a unified system, in which costs can be spread over the whole system, that we shall be able to overcome this problem.—[OFFICIAL REPORT, 16th December, 1946; Vol. 431, c. 1623.] There we have an entirely different principle from the provision of services through a charges scheme based upon the cost of the particular service. This different principle demands that there shall be a unified system so that the costs shall be spread. The Commission themselves are aware of this other principle: In their third Report they refer to what I will call this principle of internal subsidy. They said there: The complicated pattern of loadings and costs changes from hour to hour, and from service to service by days of the week. The combinations of fluctuation thus produced cannot be reflected in corresponding variations in the fare per journey undertaken by each passenger. In consequence each passenger, at one time or another, is either in receipt of 'subsidy' in the sense that he is paying less than the full cost of the service … or is himself 'subsidising' some other passenger. This is an unavoidable feature of any public service, passenger or goods, operating to regular schedules at tariffs fixed and quoted in advance. There is in a sense a social 'contract' to all those who use the services to average out the cost over periods of time and flows of traffic. This is the antinomy with which the Commission have been helplessly grap- pling. They were trying to evolve a scheme of charges, and at the same time they knew that they were obliged to provide a service which involved an element of internal subsidy and only thereby could they confer the benefits of size upon the users.