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ECONOMIC SCIENCE AND STATISTICS 141 
to any person or firm. The consequences of this to traders will be con- 
sidered later. 
Already over 100 applications for ‘ agreed charges’ have been made, 
and a large number have been sanctioned by the Tribunal. Judging from 
the number of inquiries received by the railways, this system of ‘ agreed 
charges,’ which may take the form of a flat rate on all the traffic of a firm, 
irrespective of distance or the diverse nature of the goods, would seem to 
offer definite advantages to a number of traders. The agreements so far 
made include a provision that the trader should hand to the railway the 
whole of his traffic to which the ‘ agreed charges’ are applicable. In 
one case—one of the greatest interest—the charge is based not ‘ per 
package’ or ‘ per ton’ but on an ad valorem basis of 44 per cent. of the total 
value of the goods purchased by the trader. Such a basis of charge, 
whilst not unknown in the case of road haulage, is a distinct innovation 
in the case of railways. It is obvious that these ‘ agreed charges’ may help 
to reduce accounting and clerical costs both to the trader and the railway 
company. But to the railways the main advantages are that they will 
secure additional traffic and eliminate the risk of further diversion to road 
transport. The provision in the Act of 1933, which made these charges 
legal, was inserted as a result of an adverse judgment by the Railway 
Rates Tribunal in 1932, in the celebrated ‘ Robinson Case’ when an 
agreed charge in the form of special exceptional rates proposed by the 
Great Western Railway was refused on the ground that these were not 
new exceptional rates within the meaning of the Railways Act, 1921. 
The Act of 1933, therefore, relieved the railways of a statutory limitation 
which did not apply to their road transport competitors. 
If the number of successful applications for ‘ agreed charges’ is any 
indication, it would seem that this new system of charging is likely to be 
considerably extended, especially in the case of the larger traders. It isa 
development of the utmost significance in the history of rail and road 
competition. The system of differential charging prescribed by Parlia- 
ment in the earliest Railway Acts, and continued in successive Acts, had 
already been seriously undermined by the great extension of ‘ exceptional 
rates,’ despite the attempt in the Railways Act, 1921, to reduce their 
number by the device of increasing the number of classes in the general 
railway classification from 8 to 21. ‘ Agreed charges’ are a still greater 
departure from the principles of that classification. 
The result of a large extension of the system of ‘ agreed charges’ will 
undoubtedly be still greater competition with road hauliers, and much of 
this cannot fail to be extremely wasteful to the community. But the effect 
on traders generally is even more serious. If the railways make individual 
contracts with particular traders, others in the same line of business will 
no longer be able to rely, as they have been able in the past, on non- 
preferential treatment. The appropriate flat rate to one trader may, 
owing to the different nature or scale of his business, be higher than the 
flat rates to one or more of his competitors. Hitherto he has been able 
to rely on the fact that one of his costs—his costs of transport—is identical 
with that of the others in the same place in competition with him. This 
may no longer be the case in rail rates, just as it has not necessarily been 
