Tougher licence checks coming
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• From 1971 onwards Licensing Authorities will be looking more intently at the arrangements which operators have made to comply with the 0-licensing requirements, forecast Mr Hugh Featherstone, director-general of the Freight Transport Association, on Wednesday. Addressing the Association's Preston, Blackburn and Burnley area, he reminded members that even now when the LAs were desperately short of resources to cope with the mammoth operation of converting from carriers' to operators' licensing, they were investigating vehicle maintenance, inspection, garage contracts and equipment. Yet these things were merely the paper and ribbon in which the real article—a reliable maintenance system—was wrapped.
From next year, he thought, the Authorities would be looking less at the wrapping and more at the content. "No good having a contract with a garage if the garage doesn't do the work properly. No good having monthly so-called 'inspections' when bi-monthly ones of the right type and quality would do the job better," he said.
Mr Featherstone declared that there were thousands of operators whose maintenance systems were still not good enough to stand up to the full rigours of operators' licensing once this honeymoon period was over. Hundreds were pouring good money down the drain because they had accepted misguided advice and put in an unnecessarily complicated and expensive systems. The moral was, he said, to consult the FTA.