Delay hours/records 3 months, FTA insists
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• The Freight Transport Association has written to the Ministry of Transport saying that the timetable for the introduction of drivers' hours and records rules is now completely unrealistic and should be put back three months, to June 1 1970. This was revealed by Mr. G. E. Page, president, at the annual luncheon of the FTA Yorkshire division in Leeds on Wednesday.
'When the date March 1, was first announced the FTA regarded it as a reasonable one but, here, in the second week of October, we still have not received the first draft of the drivers' records regulations. Even if we receive them tomorrow, and there is realistic consultation about them—as surely there must be on a system which has remained unchanged for nearly 40 years—it will still be impossible for the Parliamentary processes to be completed until well into the New Year. Well into the New Year before companies can finally decide on the printing of their new record forms, let alone distribute them, instruct their staff in the new system and so forth.
-This is insufficient time to do the job properly. For many hundreds of firms, it is not just a matter of ordering off the shelf, It is a matter of carefully devising their own tailor-made records which will serve a number of management functions peculiar to their own businesses.
"I do not blame the Ministry for the delay. I is a complex matter, and no doubt they, like us, want to get it right. But I would blame them if, having reached this position, they still attempted to adhere to the original timetable."