The rail strikes of 1919, 1924 and 1926 accelerated the transfer of goods transportation from rail to road. This caused increasing alarm within the Ministry of Transport, who were concerned that fierce competition from road hauliers would impede the commercial recovery of the rail system in a post WW1 Britain; it also rendered the capital infrastructure investment case more difficult.
By 1930 the railway companies had been granted the right to acquire road haulage firms, but their purchases were generally unsuccessful. Even being able to operate an integrated road and rail service failed to deliver bottom line profitability. Various reports were commissioned to investigate the problem with their output usually suggesting that it was rail’s comparative high fixed cost base that was the principle issue. The solution proposed was to legislate and restrict the commercial transport of goods. This manifested itself in the licencing system introduced in the 1930 and 1934 Road Traffic Acts.
Notwithstanding these new restrictions, rail still failed to provide cost and customer service effective competition to road; more radical solutions were sought. The Labour Party’s Herbert Morrisson examined the issue in some detail in a 1932 paper, ‘Socialisation of Transport’. This explored the problem and explained how commercial transport could be nationalised and migrated into a single national integrated road and rail service.
The British Transport Commission (BTC) was established, as was the Road Transport Executive (RTE). The RTE had the power to compulsorily acquire road haulage companies, compensating them with BTC stock. BRS, British Road Services, became the designated operating entity for the road haulage industry, with acquired undertakings injected into it once compulsory acquisition had taken place.
RTE issued its initial ‘Monthly List of Acquired Undertakings’ in September 1948, a list of approximately two hundred formerly independent companies. Lists were then issued on a monthly basis until the RTE deemed the nationalisation of the industry complete.
The return of a Conservative government in 1951 marked the start of de-nationalisation, or the ‘privatisation’ of BRS. A new Act, The Transport Act 1953, received Royal Assent in November 1953. This formalised the enforced sale of BRS assets. In the following years over 20,000 BRS vehicles were sold via tender, although even with so many disposals the company still retained a good 13,000. BRS survived in a number of guises and brands until its final dissolution in the year 2000.
