Examination of witnesses
(Questions 360 - 379)
WEDNESDAY 9 DECEMBER
MR JAMES
HOOKHAM, MR
LAWRENCE CHRISTENSEN
and MR GEOFF
DOSSETTER
360. What effect will that have on existing
freight railways? Given that you have embraced rail as members,
what is the effect going to be on EWS, or anyone else for that
matter, for freight on the railways, with the likely introduction
of the 44-tonne truck?
(Mr Hookham) We understand the case which EWS
have made and the headline figure which they have used.
361. So what is that figure?
(Mr Hookham) I believe they say 20 per cent, but
we have not been told any further details on that.
362. It is not a case of being told. As
an association which embraces rail, surely you should have that
information to hand and realise the implications of what you are
making as representations to have 44-tonne trucks operating, which
are going to destroy our roads, instead of going and maintaining
itself on rail. You are taking 20 per cent of your business of
freight off rail back to road. That cannot be good for the environment
and it is certainly not going to do very much good to the idea
that the Government have of an integrated transport policy, is
it?
(Mr Hookham) I would contest some of the points
which you make there, but I think the key thing is that we are
looking for efficiency, we are looking to reduce the number of
lorries, the amount of emissions, the number of journeys which
are being made. By increasing the payload by an increase in the
maximum lorry weight, that would create an undeniable saving simply
because I think it is self-evident that you would be able to deliver
the same quantity of goods in fewer vehicles. We hear what the
EWS and other operators say, and we would like to look at that
in more detail, but they have never given any further details
of that. Until we understand which sectors they believe are vulnerable
to that, I do not think a more informed position can be taken,
which we are more than happy to look at. In the areas where we
know, because our members tell us, that they will be able to reduce
the number of lorry journeys, many of those operations, as Lawrence
described, would not be amenable to carriage by railway anyway.
So I think we are looking across the modes, we are looking at
what can actually deliver real efficiencies very quickly. There
is no doubt that increasing lorry weights so you can increase
the payload of each vehicle would deliver that, and it would deliver
it overnight if it were to be introduced.
363. It does seem to me that you stick very
rigidly to your traditional membership.
(Mr Christensen) I think the best response I can
give to this question—and I do not think the EWS, with whom
we work closely, would disagree with this—is that if every
piece of freight that you could get on the railways went on the
railways tonight, then road transport would reduce by something
around 5 per cent.
364. It is a fair saving, is it not?
(Mr Christensen) Yes, but then there is the other
95 per cent where a 44-tonne lorry would have a greater effect
than the amount of freight that you are moving onto the railways.
So I see the two things as not being in competition at all.
Chairman: We may have
some argument on that.
Mr Stringer
365. The section in your submission entitled
"Road Network" is very gently worded, but do I take
it that you fundamentally disagree with the Government's policy
of not building more roads to deal with traffic congestion?
(Mr Hookham) We certainly do not see anything
in the Government's policy which is going to make a difference
to the fact that the road network is getting more congested. Whilst
we fully support, and our submissions on the White Paper itself
made very clear, that our priorities were first to make the best
of what we have got, we welcome the initiatives in terms of maximising
throughput and flow on the existing network, but I think there
comes a point where the only practical method for solving what
are becoming serious bottlenecks in the country's road transport
system may well be not necessarily new construction but the physical
construction of new capacity. That is what we are looking for.
I think we made the point just now in respect of railways that
we are looking for capacity to ensure that the reliability of
the system, be it road or rail, can be assured into the future,
so that planning decisions can be made with more certainty than
they can at the moment.
366. So to be clear, you think that the
Government should be spending more money on building more capacity,
more new roads?
(Mr Hookham) Yes indeed.
367. Thank you for that. Do you believe
that road hauliers should pay the full costs which can be attributed
to their lorries?
(Mr Hookham) I think they should certainly pay
their wear and tear costs in terms of the fact that there is an
impact obviously which a lorry has on the infrastructure, and
we believe that that is already covered—in fact, in some
cases more than covered—through the existing VED structure.
If you then extend the argument into recovering the external costs,
what are you actually trying to achieve? If you are going to try
to bring more efficiencies into the transport system and trying
to make them make fewer emissions by reducing their journeys,
simply putting up the price is not the best way of doing that.
You want to direct actions by more clear policies than simply
recovering more money from them. So we are more concerned with
what the final goal is.
368. Do you have any evidence that if excise
duty were to go up, operators would register abroad? That has
been mooted by road hauliers. Do you have any direct evidence
of that?
(Mr Dossetter) It is a fact that the VED prices
in the United Kingdom are very substantially higher than anywhere
else in Europe. If you take the case of the 38-tonne vehicles,
the price in the United Kingdom is £3,210, and in France,
just across the water, we are looking at £500. That does
concentrate the mind of those operators who are running a large
number of those maximum-size vehicles. You come back to the relationship
of vehicle excise duty. The fact is that a 38-tonne vehicle pays
about £22,000 a year in tax. That is about double the price
which is operative in the rest of Europe. That does not make us
particularly competitive if we are dealing with our European rivals.
369. Is there any evidence that any companies
are moving there?
(Mr Dossetter) I think many companies are seriously
looking at the detail of this matter. It is something the FTA
is itself looking at and investigating at the moment, but I do
not think we have an answer on that.
Chairman
370. If you have detailed information, would
you be prepared to give that to the Committee?
(Mr Dossetter) Yes indeed. I believe this matter
is being investigated by others within the industry.
Mr Olner
371. Could I come back to road usage in
more detail. We spoke about quality partnerships. What would you
expect local authorities to provide as part of the quality partnership
for freight?
(Mr Christensen) One of the things that would
be a big benefit both for what the Government is trying to achieve
and also industry would be if we were able to utilise our road
network more efficiently and more effectively. There are a lot
of occasions, particularly at night, where the roads are necessarily
empty and we are not allowed on them because something like 50
per cent of our stores have curfews where we are not allowed to
deliver to those stores between ten at night and six in the morning.
That means that most of my lorries are pushed onto the roads exactly
when you do not want them to be there and I do not want them to
be there, because that is when they are least efficient.
372. So you want the local authorities to
roll over and give you complete freedom to do what you want?
(Mr Christensen) No.
373. That is their part of the partnership,
is it?
(Mr Christensen) No. When I say "partnership"
I mean partnership. What I am seeing is a best-practice scenario
that providing we sign a contract—I use that word loosely—with
local authorities as to what we will seek to do at our stores,
what kind of vehicles we will use to deliver to the stores, and
as long as we comply with that, then yes, we would be allowed
to deliver to the stores on a 24-hour basis.
374. Could you broaden it a bit more? You
only have 50 per cent of the hauliers in your membership anyway.
Whilst yours is a big company, it is only a part of the membership
of the FTA, is it not?
(Mr Christensen) Yes.
375. How are you going to do it globally—Safeway,
Tesco, Co-Op? How are you going to embrace all these within quality
partnerships?
(Mr Christensen) What we have done—and we
started about 18 months ago—is that we have set up working
parties with local authorities in key towns across the country,
where environmentalists are involved, the local authority full-time
and the elected officials are involved, and the FTA members are
involved. They look at each individual town on its own, specifically
to find out what the problems are, and they discuss and agree
a way to resolve those problems. That has happened in Aberdeen,
Birmingham, Southampton, Chester. They were the pioneer towns
for this, and we had great success. That has now been rolled out
to significantly more towns and cities across the country.
376. What is the freight industry's contribution
in those quality partnerships?
(Mr Christensen) The freight industry's contribution
is to discuss with them the technical problems that we have in
making efficient deliveries into their town centres. The environmentalists
and the local councils put back their arguments or points on what
we are doing to impact upon their environment, and we tried to
find ways to work together to overcome those difficulties.
Christine Butler
377. In present market conditions, transport
of freight by road is still by far the cheapest option, and so
there is a desire to cling to that. Even then you are talking
about making technical efficiencies which will provide cost savings
to the industry. One of the obstacles within the road haulage
movement is that you are saying quite clearly, as we understand
it, that congestion causes the industry a lot of problems, so
we are now talking about the cheapest option of moving freight,
and that one of the obstacles even then is to do with congestion.
We all know about the environmental impact of that. Why do you
not want to be part of a road-pricing policy that would mitigate
against congestion?
(Mr Hookham) Because I think we start from the
point of why are the vehicles there, why are those lorries on
the road? They are there to do a job. In respect of urban road
pricing, they are there to deliver goods and services to the trading
community in the centres of towns and cities. It does not make
sense to make those activities any more expensive than they need
to be, because it simply adds to the costs of trading in those
towns and cities.
378. Have you an assessment at all of the
amount of money it costs to have lorries held up in traffic jams?
I am often held up myself in traffic jams and I see the congestion.
I do not know what the costs are, but perhaps your industry does.
(Mr Hookham) The costs are very substantial overall—somewhere
around a figure of £20 billion.
379. Compared to road pricing?
(Mr Hookham) Yes. A supplementary point I want
to make is that it is important to identify why the lorries are
there, that they need the priority to gain access and they should
not be made more expensive than they need to be. On the other
hand, business is more used to spending money to gain tangible
benefits. Perhaps if a case can be made with a local authority
within a quality partnership that, in order to achieve real improvements
in efficiency and delivery efficiency, then a case can be made
on which there is an assured return in terms of improvements,
I think business would be prepared to look at that, because that
is the way it trades and it looks at these things.
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