Petrol Muddle
IF Mr. Harold Watkinson, Minister of Transport, could find nothing more helpful to say, on his abrupt return from Switzerland last week, than that there was `no mess' over petrol rationing, he might have done better to stay there and finish his holiday. For the motor-fuel rationing scheme, at. any rate as it affects commercial vehicles, is a mess in principle and a worse mess in practice.
A cut of 25 per cent. in supplies of petrol and diesel oil should not have been too difficult to make nor, properly distributed, should the cut have caused excessive hardship to any one section of users. But the ration, to ensure this, should have had some relation to need—in other words, to normal requirements. The basic ration, however, for all commercial vehicles, is two gallons per half-ton unladen weight per week; no account is taken of the nature of the work for which the vehicle is used, nor of the distances over which it normally works.
This was bad enough; but worse was to follow. The instructions given by the Minister to the eleven Regional Transport Commissioners for their guidance when issuing supplementary rations were so vague that they allowed the widest pos- sible variations of practice as between regions; firms operating over similar distances and with similar loads have found that they have been treated quite differently. Yorkshire, it appears, is generous; the East Midlands far less so. And there is evidence that in Scotland the initial blunder of tying the basic ration to carrying capacity has been intensified by the practice of relating the supplementary ration to the basic ration, which seems to indicate that somebody is adding local tomfoolery to national shortsighted- ness.
Moreover, there appears to be no uniformity in the period for which supplementaries are being issued. In some areas they are being issued for the entire sixteen-week rationing period, in some for eight weeks only, and is some for four. In very many cases they have not been issued at all. The Ministry's answer to the charge of delay in issuing extra rations is that until the Regional Commis- sioners know the extent of the demand—i.e. until all or most users have put in their applications— they dare not divide the available fuel, lest the later applicants should find themselves refused petrol to which they have a legitimate claim. But this argument needs qualification. In the first place, there is nothing in it to stop the issue of `interim' supplementaries to keep firms in opera- tion; in the second place, there seems to be a remarkable vagueness about the available supply of fuel. Nobody, for instance, appearS to know how much petrol is going into the pumps; it seems to be enough that fresh supplies are only delivered against the return of ration units by the garages. There is a general confidence that the ration can be met, but it is not entirely clear on what this confidence is based.
It is welcome news that Mr. Watkinson, at his meeting on Tuesday with representatives of the Road • Haulage Association, said that the Corn- Missioners were to be instructed to take hardship into account when allocating supplementary rations; there have been cases of 'A' licence operators with only one or two vehicles having been refused any supplementary ration, even though they worked over great distances, which would mean their imminent ruin. But more needs to be done. if rationing is to extend into a second sixteen-week period, as now appears virtually certain, serious thought should be given to chang- ing the principle on which the basic ration is allocated. In any case, and as a measure-to stave off possible disaster, there seems to be an over- whelming case for suspending entirely the restric- tions on holders of 'C' licences (by far the largest group of commercial vehicle operators), which at present prevent them from carrying any but their own goods, and thus allowing the pooling of vehicles. If the hauliers (particularly the long- distance firms) are to take the brunt of the scheme's inequities, as appears to be the case, somebody has got to shift the goods. Certainly British Railways cannot; over 3,000,000 tons are moved daily by road in this country, and BR cannot possibly manage more than a small fraction of the goods which the hauliers, if the rationing mess continues, will have to refuse. Already a number of producers, particularly of bulky goods such as furniture, are running into difficulties of storage. A good deal more urgency, and a good deal less complacency, is called for on the part of the Minister of Transport.
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