High court rejects TNT's London lorry ban appeal
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• The High Court has told TNT that it was wrong to sidestep parts of the London lorry ban to save money.
Dismissing appeals by TNT Express (UK) against convictions for breaching the ban, the Queen's Bench division has ruled that commercial considerations should not be relevant in determining a practical route to comply with the conditions of an access permit.
TNT has been refused leave to appeal to the House of Lords. It had been fined £750 for breaching the conditions by magistrates at Walton Street and Horseferry Road because vehicles, although covered by ban permits, had not minimised their use of banned roads. For the company, John Hardy said that the vehicles had been delivering newspapers from Wapping in East London to Bristol. He argued that avoiding banned roads would have delayed them by up to 50 minutes, making the journeys less commercially viable.
Dismissing the appeals, Mr Justice Waller said there was a clear obligation under Condition 5 to stay on non-banned roads until as near as possible to the planned stopping place. This meant a company had to take the shortest practicable route from the stopping place to the nearest ban-free road or to the next planned stopping place.