Ashe & Nephew guilty on use of agency vehicle
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IN Liverpool Stipendiary magistrate George Wooton has found an operator guilty of 'using' a vehicle which had been hired and driven by an agency driver. T F Ashe & Nephew, which denied using a vehicle with a 10% front axle overload (CM October 18), was fined £20.
Wooton said the issue was whether or not the driver was in a 'master and servant' relationship with Ashe & Nephew. The terms and conditions of business of the agency stated that the driver was considered to be an employee of the client while driving for them.
The driver, Alan Dawson, had been driving for Ashe & Nephew under its orders during the course of its business. Justice Brown, in the 1981 case of Alcock v Griston, had said that he took the definition of 'employer' in the 1968 Act as meaning that the driver was employed by the person who wanted him to drive.
It was plain that at the material time Dawson was the defendant's 'servant'. The agency was acting as agents of Ashe & Nephew in the payment of Dawson's wages and making PAYE and National Insurance deductions where appropriate.
It was a novel case, but he was imposing only a token fine with no award of costs as Dawson had had no say in the way the vehicle was loaded in a bonded warehouse where there was no weighbridge available and this was not a case of gross
overload.