Us get tough on excessive hours
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by Mike Jewell and Miles Brignall • Drivers caught falsifying tachograph charts to cover up excessive hours offences can expect to have their licences suspended for up to 18 months as part of a tougher policy adopted by the Licensing Authorities.
The crackdown was signalled by North Eastern Deputy Licensing Authority Mark Hinchliffe at a Leeds inquiry last week when he suspended 15 drivers' licences for between two and five days for falsifying charts and several drivers' hours offences. Hinchliffe said the bans on the drivers, from Sheffield-based Newall and Wright, would have been months rather than days if the offences had taken place more recently.
Hinchcliffe said a tired driver was as dangerous to others as a drunk driver and if he had deliberately driven excessive hours and attempted to cover it up, should be treated as such. He added that suspensions of 12 and 18 months imposed on a number of coach drivers in similar circumstances had been upheld on appeal. This was the approach that was going to be taken in the future, he said.
The DLA said he took into account that five of the firm's drivers had already received suspensions of four and five days when they appeared before DLA Brian Horner in February, before "the new sterner policy was evolved". Hinchliffe said he felt it would be unfair to treat the drivers before him any differently.
For the drivers, Gary Hodgson said the police investigation had started in 1991 and had led to the case at Sheffield Crown Court in October 1994, when two partners of the firm were cleared and a number of drivers dealt with. Because the drivers presently before the DLA could not be dealt with by magistrates, they had had the matter hanging over their heads for some four years.
Eastern LA Compton Boyd says longer suspensions are an inevitable consequence of Senior LA Ronald Ashford's call for a crack-down on tachograph offences.
"The Vehicle Inspectorate is putting more tachograph cases before LAs and we are all much more conscious of the problem. I applaud the DLA's decision," he says.
Ashford's crackdown could mean longer licence suspensions for tacho offenders.