K.C. Magistrate Champions Employers A JUDGMENT which, if upheld by
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a higher court on appeal, may prove to be of the utmost importance to the road-transport industry, was given by Mr. J. Bowen Davies, K.C., Aberdare stipendiary magistrate.
He ruled that if an employer takes the precaution to warn a driver carefully to 'keep the records required under the Road and Rail Traffic Act, and inspects them daily, he makes the driver, his agent in the matter and has observed the . obligations to keep records. He is then not resporisible for the driver failing' to make the -entries at the proper time.
The Stipendiary, who was delivering a considered judgment' on a case heard a week previously, intimated his willingness to state a case for appeal.
Messrs. Thomas Hopkins and Albert Hopkins, of Merthyr Tydfil, were summoned for failing to cause the records in respect of one of their vehicles to he kept on one day. The lorry driver, Mr. Horace Cane, was summoned for failing to keep the record. The case against the employers was dismissed, but the driver was fined 10s.
The Stipendiary said that the semmonses were " bad," in that they did not state the Section of the Act under which they were taken out.
" I have formed definite opinions," he continued, "that it is impossible for employers to be always standing over their employees to see that they 'carry 'out the 'Act of Parliament. . . . If an employer is to be made responsible in this way for his employees. he would have to accompany a driver and see that the driver inserted the time when he started on his record book and the time he took his period of rest, and that is asking something that is impossible.I do not think that the businesses 15..f the country cbuld be carried on if it were enforced,"