News

Transport lobbying on fuel duty and the impact of foreign trucks on domestic haulage fell flat last week, as:

• The chancellor ended three years of a freeze on fuel duty to add 1.25p/lit, and;
• The report of the Treasury-led road haulage task group finally buried hopes of a rebate for any section of UK haulage and played down the impact of cabotage.

But Brown confirmed that a detailed study is being made of introducing a vignette - as exclusively reported by  MT (November 2). However, the FTA attacked the Treasury for hesitating on setting up the vignette, which would be a database to improve enforcement on foreign trucks. Gordon Brown's fuel duty increase last week drew a mixed response.

Keyfuels managing director Chris Welsh said that he had expected the duty increase to be greater paradoxically, none of his larger customers appeared to be ordering ahead of the pre-Budget. Possibly they weren't expecting any increase, he speculated. The RHA says it is "devastated" by the duty increase. "It is a tremendous blow to UK hauliers already operating at a considerable financial disadvantage to their European counterparts," it says.

The FTA called the increase "a breach of faith with the road freight industry. It will add £170m to industry's costs - and the chancellor has chosen to walk away from the cabotage problem," the FTA says. Both the RHA and FTA say the chancellor sees haulage as a cash cow - "a source of tax revenue that  he can plunder with impunity", the FTA says.

UK lorry VED rates are £500 above EU minimum levels, it adds. "The very least the chancellor should have done was to reduce lorry VED to offset in part the effect on competitiveness of fuel duty rises." It is now clear that the industry has come away empty-handed from the year-long task group, which was set up as a result of the Burns Report.

Margins have tightened, the task group says, but "current margins in the haulage industry do not stand out as particularly weak compared with a range of other manufacturing and service sectors". It mostly dismisses cabotage claims and notes that, of the new EU states, "only Slovenia's hauliers are allowed to undertake cabotage".