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are down for agr ultural haida e
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Legal exemptions mean agricultural tractors and trailers can be operated with a frightening disregard for health and safety — as CM'S insider JJ Bardon found out on a mission hauling spuds.
()body in the road freight sector will need reminding of the vast list of rules and regulations that control the trucks we use and how we use them. Pursuing UK drivers and hauliers with missionary zeal are the police ;Vosa: the Traffic Commissioners; the Highways Agency (HA); the DVLA;the Driver Support Agency; Defra and its enforcement officers; Speed Camera Partnerships; and, of course local authorities with their own sets of regulations. The upside of this red tape is the high standard of engineering and safety met by the trucks running on UK roads.
But what most people in the industry are not aware of is the massive weights that agricultural tractor/trailer combinations are running at on A and Broads. Our experience points to weights of 35 tonnes and more, 25 tonnes ol which is pounding down on the single towing eye of a four-axle unit with no air brakes and no minimum tread depth on the trailer tyres, which might well he driven by a 17-year-old on a provisional licence.
Arcane knowledge
Should you want to find out the legal GVW ol an agricultural tractor and trailer combination as set out by transport law today you will have quite a job on your hands.
We trawled through the websites of Vosa Defra, the DVLA and the HA and were unable tc extract a clear figure. Fmally we tracked down the Vosa technical officer on this matter who explained that the maximum legal train weight foi such a combination is 24,390kg.
In addition, despite rumblings which mighl lead to changes in the law, there is currently nc annual test for these vehicles— and where there is regulation, it goes pretty much unenforced. Foi starters, how many farm tractors do you see witt an 0-licence, even though many habituaTh operate beyond their 15-mile operating radius?
Likewise, how many of them operate unde:
tachograph rules? Not any that we know of, Wherever we looked when investigating this topic we found that the current situation is, to put it mildly, shodcly.To identify a tractor driver who, for instance, sideswipes a car, you might find, if you are lucky, that he has a number plate on the rear of the trailer. However 50 such units may have the same number plate if they are operated by the same farm operation.
And if you manage to turn around safely and pursue him you would then have to overtake him particularly challenging if he is towing a 3m-wide piece of equipment stop him, identify him, and then make your complaint. A farm worker with a 300hp tractor and trailer can work 100 hours a week and in the process haul more than 2,000 tonnes of produce over 1.500 miles with no legal restrictions. Most hauliers would be hard-pressed to shift 500 tonnes on a 44-tonne artie on short runs legally.
It's a shocking fact that a 17-year-old novice driver is allowed to get behind the wheel an agricultural artic and drive it on the public highway, simply because of 'agricultural exemptions'. And this at a time when transient government ministers are going on about raising the car driving age to18 and introducing a minimum requirement of 5(X) hours of training. •