Tony Slevenson was no greenhorn when he answered an advertisement
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from haulier X, but the work he took on cost him more than his business.
IN There is a haulier currently operating in the North-West that owner-drivers and sub-contractors would do well to avoid.
For legal reasons we will simply call him X — some of the operators who have had dealings with him would doubtless come up with a more imaginative epithet.
Owner-driver Tony Stevenson was no greenhorn when he came across X: he has been in the haulage industry since 1973, pulling curtainsiders, bulk grain tippers and reefers.
Having taken on an Iveco Ford on short-term lease, Stevenson answered an advert placed by X in the trade press. He hired a new curtainsider trailer from X, based on the strength of the work on offer, and set off for Merseyside.
"I went up on the Friday to pick up a trailer to load for a Monday run from Skelmersdale," says Stevenson. It was a four-drop job, loading in Runcorn and dropping in Devon and Cornwall. On the Tuesday I reloaded in Bridgewater.
"It went fine, but on the Monday of the following week I got the rates for that first job and nearly dropped to the floor. thought they had made some mistake. It was £200 when I knew from experience that it should have been double," Stevenson recalls.
Another job took him with a load of beer from Blandford to Aylesford. His contract note, handed over the following week, quoted 200. "I phoned up the transport manager at the customer's end and asked him what the normal rate was. He told me £200, which is around the amount I had expected," says Stevenson.
DESPERATE
The situation turned nasty when Stevenson rang up X's office to complain about the rate, only to be bombarded with abuse. He finally tracked down X. The response was a veiled "do you know who you are dealing with?" and things got worse when a desperate Stevenson tried to keep hold of the hired trailer in protest.
What X said next has stayed with Stevenson: "He told me that if I didn't give him back the trailer he would put an effing gun in my mouth and what's more, he would make my family suffer." Stevenson and his wife Wendy have two children.
Shaken, Stevenson contacted his local police force in Stratford-upon-Avon and told them about the threat In most cases, such intimidation is little more than hot air, but when the Stratford police contacted Merseyside CID, they were told to treat the threat very seriously.
"The day after I contacted the police down here an officer came round to our house and told me what they knew," says Stevenson. X was a man with a dubious business history. He had been the managing director of another large haulage fu-m which had gone under in strange circumstances. Creditors were never paid and the
police suspected funds had been drained away by X.
The following month was a nightmare for the Stevenson family. Wendy Stevenson recounts a catalogue of horror: "The police told me to keep a whistle by the door in case we received unwelcome visitors.
"I was to keep a camera to hand and take pictures of them if they came to the house — though just how I was supposed to manage this I don't know," she says.
She was asked to make a note of the registration numbers of any suspicious cars and was told not to leave the children alone in the house. Normally they arrived home before Wendy returned from work, so special arrangements had to be made.
The police patrolled the house constantly, especially when Tony was away driving. "That gave me some feeling of security, but I knew the police couldn't be there all the time," says Wendy. "It was frightening and the patrols continued for almost a month.
UNACCEPTABLE
Stevenson kept the trailer for a week before deciding that the risk was unacceptable. He had started working for a firm which X sometimes called in for back loads. Stevenson left the trailer in the yard and it was picked up.
He then issued a County Court summons against X to try and claw back some recompense, but in the end X had only to pay his own absurdly low rates. To add insult to injury, X then charged Stevenson for the extra week of trailer hire at the higher daily rate.
As if that wasn't enough the cheque, when it finally arrived in the spring of 1990, was made out to `J Stevenson Ltd'. Tony's first name is John, but as he had not set himself up as a limited company, the cheque was invalid.
He and Wendy went up to X's depot and were thankful that X's cashiers changed the cheque on the spot. "I didn't want to have an arguement with him about this," says Stevenson. He always seemed to have four guys with him who were really minders. They were handpicked guys, all much bigger than me."
The episode put Stevenson out of business. He rang Iveco Ford to say that he could no longer keep up the payments for the truck and it was taken back in January 1990.
CREDITORS
Meanwhile other bills had been piling up. "Our biggest creditors were fuel suppliers and we simply could not pay them off," says Stevenson. "Because I was the victim of a bad debt I had no choice but to become a bad debtor myself. Because I wasn't getting paid, I could not pay myself. It's a vicious circle."
Having lost his business Stevenson went to work as a mechanic. It was a bitter blow: "What galls me more than anything I think is the fact that this guy is still doing business, still advertising for owner-drivers, and still making a lot of money," he says.
But has it taught him any lessons? "Well, if I had to do it again I would want something pretty concrete in writing about the job and the rate for it," he says. "A fax would be enough. If I went to work for a company on a regular basis which wasn't a big name I would ask to see some sort of bank references. And if the company refused that would arouse my suspicions."
But with more than 17 years in haulage under his belt, Stevenson is a realist. Too many trucks are chasing too little work and rate cutting is rife. Nobody admits they do it themselves, but claim that everybody else is doing it. Whatever the case, hauliers and owner-drivers often have to take work on trust. Often there is simply not enough time to carry out sufficient checks: if you don't take the work on the spot, it will go elsewhere.
"It's been said to me many times before, but hauliers who rate cut are just cutting their own throats," says Stevenson. "It's up to hauliers to refuse bad work. If everybody refuses it, the rates will go up."
"You could say that I put too much trust in X, but on the surface it seemed a good idea. I was not the first guy he did this too and I'm sure I won't be the last." LI by Paul Fisher