TWO MORE ABOLITIONS

Evening Post, Volume CXL, Issue 147, 19 December 1945, Page 7

TWO MORE ABOLITIONS

WARTIME RESTRICTIONS

(Special P.A. Correspondent.) Rec. 11 a.m. LONDON. Dec. 18

Two important wartime controls will be abolished in Britain at the end of this year. In future motor-cars may be bought without a licence, and anybody will again be able to open a retail shop without a licence. Newspapers, howeyer, are to continue to remain at their present wartime size. The Minister of War Transport stated that in yiew of the increased production which is anticipated in 1946 the system of licences to acquire all types of motor vehicles will be discarded. The sale of second-hand Public Service vehicles, such as buses, will likewise no longer be controlled.The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders has undertaken, on behalf of their principal members, that during the first six months of 1946 half of the output of new cars and one-third of the output of commercial vehicles will be devoted to export. As a result of this announcement the British motor manufacturers are preparing for a car production boom. Representatives of the industry are agreed that the decision will give an incalculable boost to British car production.

Mr. F. R. C. Rootes, president of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, and deputy chairman of the Rootes group, said: "It means that distribution will soon be functioning mo.re normally." \ '

Mr. H. Seaward, managing director of Morris Motors, said that the main benefit would be that it would enable production planners to get to work. "We have never been able to discover exactly what demand for cars exists in Britain today," he said. "We shall now be able to plan ahead." The decision to allow anyone to open a retail shop without a licence was announced by Sir Stafford Cripps, who said the Government was ending the "Location of Retail Businesses Order" and closing the register of withdrawn traders. He added that the order had been kept on to help former traders as a class, particularly' those disabled by the war, though not ex-servicemen as such. "There are now many exservicemen whose interests we all desire to regard who have been prevented from trading because they are neither former traders nor war disabled," he said. Former traders had had six months to take up their former businesses. Ex-servicemen must now be allowed to enter the field.