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LAYING DOWN THE LAW
Page 56
Page 57
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Commercial Motor's 25th annual Fleet Management Conference last week heard how the law on overloading, due diligence, truck speed limiters and 40 tonnes GVW operates in practice. You may think things are tough now, but be warned — things could soon get tougher.
• Roads and Traffic Minister Peter Bottomley kicked off this year's Fleet Management Conference by telling delegates that compulsory truck speed limiters are just around the corner and that 40 tonnes GVW in Britain is still unlikely.
Speaking at the Metropole Hotel in Birmingham, Bottomley said: "Speed limiters in trucks. . should be the next step on from coaches — unless the number of IIGV speedsters is reduced."
An increase in HGV gross vehicle weights to 40 tonnes is still politically undesirable in the UK, said Bottomley: "Go to the House of Commons and see how many MPs are prepared to stand up and say that they want 40 tonnes GVW or 11.5-tonne drive axles. The answer is nil."
Britain's bridges cannot cope with an increase to 40 tonnes, said the Minister — one bridge collapse is all that it would take to turn public opinion still further against HGVs, he warned.
Bottomley reaffirmed that the national bridge-strengthening programme he unveiled last year will take 15 years to complete. Only when these repairs have been carried out will our bridges have "real a-otection", said Bottomley.
L_I See page 6 for more details.
COURTROOM BATTLE MI The highlight of the conference's overloading debate was a mock courtroom battle in which real-life magistrate John Hosking, currently chairman of the Kent Magistrates' Courts Committee, found Special Types haulier Gary Hodgson guilty on four counts of overloading.
Defence lawyer Stephen Kirkbright tried to persuade delegates (who acted as an over-sized jury voting on the guilt of the haulier in the dock, while the magis
trate was "out of court" considering his verdict) that Hodgson was innocent because the artic had not been weighed accurately and because the trading standards officer present had not acted within the guidelines of his official Code of Practice.
The court was told that the haulier had been pulled in by the police to check gross vehicle and axle weights at a roadside dynamic axle weigher. The unit was found to weigh 60,050kg in total, which did not tally with the Special Types notification order allowing it to carry 56,000kg.
Prosecution lawyer Jonathan Lawton said that exceeding the protection of the Special Types order meant that Hodgson was no longer protected by its provisions. His overload was consequently calculated on the normal Construction and Use Regulations which only allow 38 tonnes gross vehicle weight, and Hodgson was charged with a 22,050kg overload.
Hodgson was carrying a crane base from Braintree in Essex to Plymouth and could not believe that he was so far out of line. The figures did not tally with the weights that he had been given by the civil engineer when loading, and he was so amazed by the scale of the overload that he called into a quarry plate weighbridge immediately afterwards, which indicated that the weight was indeed within the 56tonne limit. His error was to carry out this second weight check on his own.
Stephen Kirkbright, prosecuting, tried to prove that the dynamic axle weighbridge had not been properly operated; that only part of the heavy haulage unit was on the concrete apron, with the bogie wheels still resting on the tarmac approach road; and that the unit had been driven in too quickly on the day of the check.
The case was lost — even half of the delegates in the audience thought that haulier Hodgson was out of line and guilty of an overload.
The advice to hauliers afterwards was always to ask for a second weigh on the day (especially with dynamic axle weighers) and, immediately after leaving the site, to go to a certified public weighbridge (preferably a single-plate weighbridge) and to get your vehicle indepen dently re-weighed. Keep these additional weight tickets, make sure that the weighbridge manager oversees the operation and then bring him and the ticket evidence with you to court.
Lawton and Kirkbright said after the case that many transport lawyers regard the overloading system as iniquitous, and that they object to the assumption that the haulier must prove himself innocent. This, after all, flies in the face of accepted British legal practice, which assumes that a person or company is innocent until proven guilty.
WHY THE DIFFERENCE?
• Following Douglas Anderson's speech on the problems that the judiciary faces when dealing with transport cases, Richard Edwards of Bell Lines asked Anderson to explain why, when three of his drivers were tried for overloading, one was discharged, one fined .2500 and one was fined £1,725, even though the offences were identical.
Anderson replied that the courts are in "a no-win situation", and that it is very hard to have the exact outcome in each case. He added: "There is a way of guaranteeing you get the same answer, and that is by having a software programme where you can press in all the details and then come out with the same answer."
Chris ifutterfield from Thomas Mallam Solicitors of Oxford said that some operators have claimed that if you come before the wrong bench, you might as well adjourn the meeting until the next day. Anderson stressed that he was on the operators' side, adding: "It is not a game we are playing." He felt that the odd accidental infringement should not be prosecuted.
IGNORANCE
• Bob Adamson of TNT Express told the conference that drivers usually break the law because of ignorance. He asked his audience if they knew what type of tachograph to use, and how long a driver can legally work.
In both cases, the audience was split in half, which Adamson said proved his point that transport managers are moving "blindly forward, taking the drivers with them".
Bob Ward of the RHA (Midlands) said that the drivers' hours rules will have to be simplified because he, for one, could not explain them to his own transport department or the police. Even they have different views, he said, so how can we expect drivers to understand the law? Adamson said that although the police and the ministry have a lot to answer for, they should not take all the blame when some operators cannot even manage to fill in their full name on the disk. A lot of things should be blamed on management, because it is their responsibility to check such matters, said Adamson.
DUE DILIGENCE
• Transport Consultant Stan Thomas told the conference that it is impossible to accurately assess the weight of a commercial vehicle, and that the law should provide for a defence of due diligence.
Weighbridges do not allow for the load's re-distribution, so that when two tests are made the weights differ. There is a grey area, said Thomas, where a vehicle may be full but does not pose any threat to either the public or the environment. Most 38-tonners are designed to carry 44 tonnes and are not dangerous when overloaded within their design capability.
Colin Ward asked how many manufacturers are addressing the problem and fitting on-board weighers as standard. Thomas replied, "none". It would not be practical for hauliers to have their own weighing equipment on board because of cost, and in any case the results would not stand up in court. He said: "It would be like being stopped for speeding by the police who claim you are doing 90 and you saying that your speedo read 65".
LASTING BARRIERS
▪ John Osborne's excellent paper on the future of EC transport legislation concluded that the physical and fiscal barriers will not fall in 1992, and that the various member countries of the community will continue to impose their own local laws and taxes.
The European Commission is falling further and further behind its own legislative timetable, said Osborne. It has also left the difficult issues until last and only approved the less controversial directives.
Osborne held out little hope of vehicle harmonisation in the near future and said the worst that could happen after 1992 is that the Commission could fail to open up the Single European Market while at the same time overloading Europe with a whole new set of regulatory restrictions.
On VAT, Osborne predicts that the European Commission will set a low (49%) rate for parameters for essentials like food, energy, water and drugs, with a 14-20% band for everything else.
Border delays and controls cost the EC 150 billion a year at present, said Osborne. The benefits of abolishing them ., will be huge and could help improve the number of empty trucks running around Europe. The Commission believes that at any one moment, more than 35% of Europe's trucks are running empty.
Business-confidence surveys across Europe are showing that industrialists are becoming more and more pessimistic about the future of the EC.
Four key proposals have just been dropped on scrapping border controls, no shared frontier posts have been created as intended, and it is best to buy Continental companies: "Acquire local management and expertise wherever possible," Osborne advised.