Driver fined over hours
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• Falsification of tachograph records and exceeding the daily driving limit cost Bolton driver Paul Wood £400 in fines and costs when he appeared before the town's magistrates.
Wood, of Old Road, Astley Bridge, Bolton, pleaded guilty to one offence of exceeding the daily driving limit and to one offence of making a false entry on a tachograph chart. He denied a second charge of making a false entry but was convicted by the magistrates. Wood was fined .£300 with and £100 costs.
Traffic examiner Keith Henry said there was mileage unrecorded on Wood's tachograph chart for 11 August. Wood had given two explanations—one that he had started work at Bromwich Street in Bolton; the other that another driver might have taken his vehicle. The traces on the chart indicated that the vehicle had started as if on a motorway. In his view it was not possible for the vehicle to start in that manner from Bromwich Street.
Wood maintained that the 0-100km/11 speed trace was coming out of Bromwich Street. He said that on 11 August he had gone down the road without a chart in the tachograph and had later put one in and then set off again. He denied he had falsified the chart.
Prosecuting for the Department of Transport, John Heaton said that even if the failure to put the chart in at the beginning of the day was an innocent mistake, the chart was false at the end of the day because Wood had not qualified it in any way. He had simply handed it in to his employers William Allen Transport as a complete and faithful record of all the driving he had done.
John Bleasedale, defending, argued that the prosecution had to show that the creation of the chart was deliberately false.
It was accepted there was missing mileage, said Bleasdale, but it was clear that Wood did not know what had happened. He could not really remember when he was seen by the traffic examiner. A man that could not remember could not be guilty of knowingly making a false chart.
Why should Wood fail to record 491un at the beginning of the day when he did not know what he would need at the end of the day?