Sound Sense About Timber
In its seventh report the House of Commons Select Committee on Estimates suggests that the restoration of private buying of timber will be worth trying, even if it involves an increase in cost, since it might quite well produce a lot more timber in a short time.. The best comment on this excellent piece of advice is that the President of the Board of Trade has already acted on it, in the licence signed on October 11th permitting private traders to import softwoods except from hard currency areas and Eastern Europe. After last season's performance in which the Timber Control held out for lower prices and only succeeded in losing the timber, and after the unseemly background squabble between the control and the trade over specifications which the present Report discloses, it can only be repeated that the more drastically this rather depressing Control limits its activities the better it will be for all concerned. The Committee has produced a .series of recommendations for the revision of the allocations system, the simplification of the licensing arrangements for small projects, speeding up allocations from the emergency stock of softwood and making other changes which
really add up to an argument for sweeping away the control in its present form rather than tinkering with it any longer. The very fact that the central recommendation for the restoration of private trading came from the Timber Controller himself goes far towards clinching the matter. A price rise would probably have to come in any case, since British needs are very urgent and the attempt to secure prices below the world level cannot be kept up for ever. But there is no final reason why prices should stay at their present high level,
and if they do start to come down the comparative flexibility of private buying will undoubtedly save this country a lot of money in the long run.
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