As the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, considers the measures he'll announce in his pre-budget statement this coming Thursday, disquiet is already building in the haulage industry. There been several protests this year that show the haulage industry has not forgotten.

Bubbling under

November 19th.

A new lobby group Less Tax On Fuel, staged a fuel protest in Cardiff with around 50 hauliers taking part. The target of the protestor's ire was the petrol distribution depot entrance at Cardiff Docks. The spark for the action was the decision by the French government to introduce a fuel-price subsidy for the country's hauliers and farmers, and was exacerbated by the long-running disparity in fuel-duty between the UK and continental Europe.

Haulier Martin Palmer, who organised the protest, said: "In Europe, it's supposed to be a level playing field. It seems other EU countries, mainly the French, get everything, and we get nothing. We're paying the highest prices in Europe."

June 15th.

Road Haulage Association members in Scotland organised a demonstration in Edinburgh. Approximately 80 vehicles drove through the city centre and out to the Western suburbs

"The members within my region are suffering like never before," said RHA Scotland and Northern Ireland Director, Phil Flanders. Operators are now working to the tightest possible margins; making even a small profit on a job will soon be a thing of the past."

June 5th.

A fuel protest took place in Cardiff, involving around 40 lorries, to protest at the (then) impending 2p increase in fuel duty.

Organiser Martin Palmer said, "I'm just hoping Tony Blair and Gordon Brown take notice. We intend keeping the pressure on and not waiting until August or September".

Knife edge

Professor Alan McKinnon, director of the Logistics Research Centre in the School of Management and Languages at Heriot-Watt University, has just completed a report "Life without Lorries: the Impact of a Temporary Disruption of Road Freight Transport in the UK". In his opinion, "Although people don't like lorries, we are totally dependent on them." The report, commissioned by Motor Transport, concludes, "Road freight is the life-blood of the national economy. Without lorries to carry this freight, current standards of living could be maintained for only a few days.

This point of view seems to be supported, no doubt with some regret, by Steve Hounsham of the pressure group Transport 2000 who said the UK was "shockingly dependent" on road traffic and that, "Everything is being kept on huge warehouses on the motorways." Though he added, "We'd like to see a greater degree of localisation, so we don't have to move things so far."

Contingencies

The government has this year enacted new legislation to further empower the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, known as "UK Resilience". The "Civil Contingencies Act 2004" allows the authorities to take on emergency powers in cases of "disruption of a supply of money, food, water, energy or fuel" or "disruption of facilities for transport". Does this mean that in case of haulier protests, we will see troops on the streets? Or worse?

Militating against this pre-planning, the nature of UK industry is such, that the buffer for absorbing any disruption in the supply-chain is minimal. This is due in large part to deliberately limited stock levels as a result of the current vogue amongst retailers for 'just in time' fulfilment.

If the Chancellor does increase fuel duty as he said he would, we may well be in for a "winter of discontent" that bites much harder then it did in 2000, and see the government take radical action in response.