COMPETITION BETWEEN PORTS AND INVESTMENT PLANNING

The 1960s were a decade of rapid change in overseas transport technologies. That decade saw the introduction of container ships, hovercraft, massive tankers and ore carriers, LASH (lighter‐aboard‐ship) vessels, freightliners, and jumbo jets. Many of these will achieve their full potential in the 1970s. These new transport modes have not only had an effect upon the design of ports but also upon the procedures required to control their development at a national level. Whereas in the past there may have been no technological reason to exercise any national control at all, the current situation makes it unrealistic and inefficient to leave individual ports with power to plan and implement their own major developments. The basic theme of this paper is that the state of the technology for the transport of bulk and general cargoes is such that competition between ports for the business of British exporters and importers will result in higher than necessary overseas total distribution costs. Because inland transport costs and times are so much lower the effective hinterland of each port is much larger than it used to be. However, against this has to be weighed the fact that individual ports now can have the technical capacity to handle in a year a large proportion of British cargo of a given type and on a given trade route. Therefore, as the natural, long term tendency would be for port (and perhaps shipping) monopolies to develop it is in the best interests of the users of port facilities for national control to be exercised over them. In the past the threat of local port monopolies was thwarted by local user representation on port boards; now the likelihood of national monopolies requires control at a national level.