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Transport manager takes the rap for hours offences
Page 22
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A former transport manager was blamed for drivers' hours offences and failure to use designated operating centres when an Aberfeldy-based firm appeared before Scottish Traffic Commissioner Joan Aitken.
Traffic examiner Jonathan Harvey said APW Plant was sent two warning letters about vehicles not being parked at the company's operating centres at Aberfeldy and Perth following complaints from neighbours.
He carried out an investigation following an anonymous complaint that a vehicle was being parked in a carpark at Dunkeld and disturbing neighbouring residents early in the morning when it was started. Harvey discovered four vehicles were not being kept overnight at the operating centre.
There were no tachograph charts available before September 2002 either and he was told that the company's previous transport manager, Andrew Wilson, who had been dismissed in October 2002, had taken the charts and refused to return them.
Director Patrick Bradley said that drivers had taken vehicles home because they were concerned that they would be tampered with. However, when interviewed, the drivers admitted the only reason they had taken them was for convenience and to save time.
Former driver Alistair Robb was appointed full-time transport manager after Wilson.
A tachograph chart scanner had been purchased and Robb had attended a course on its use. The drivers had been issued with a summary of the EC rules and arrangements had been made for the FTA to carry out a drivers' hours seminar for all staff, Robb said that Wilson used to make a joke of collecting the tachograph charts, making it plain he was not going to do anything with them. He was well-known in the transport industry and had been an operator for many years, Bradley admitted that he had condoned the drivers taking vehicles home, explaining that he had been struggling with the business after Wilson's departure.
Issuing the company with a severe formal warning, the IC said that she took a serious view of the way the busness had been run and the fact that it had operated without an effective transport manager.