Court throws out load fine
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• A £600 fine imposed for a drive-axle overload on Northern
Irish haulier Dukes Transport (Craigavon) by Holyhead magistrates has been quashed on appeal. found to have an overload of 1,790kg, (17%).
For Dukes, Jonathan Lawton said that the law did not require every vehicle to be weighed as the facilities at public weighbridges were inadequate. The effect was to impose an extremely high duty of care on hauliers, but that should not be a duty of awe that was beyond attainment.
Because this vehicle had been carrying meat, the driver was not allowed to participate in loading the fridge con
tamer, said Lawton, and once the container was loaded it was sealed.
He stressed that the CNIR note showed the artic was below its permitted train weight of 38 tonnes. Even so the driver checkweighed it twice: each time the train weight was around 36 tonnes.
It was not possible to isolate the drive axle on a standard plate weighbridge, said Lawton, and split-plate weighbridges were few and far between. In fact, he added, there were only nine public dynamic axle weighers in the country; five of them on the South Coast.
He maintained that there was no way the driver could have known that the drive axle was overloaded and, given the design capability of the vehicle, it was perfectly safe.
The High Court had laid down that where a defendant was morally guiltless of an absolute offence, and had not been negligent, an absolute discharge was appropriate, said Lawton. Dukes felt that it had done everything it could to prevent overloading offences.
Quashing the fine, and substituting an absolute discharge, Recorder Cenydd Howells said there was no degree of blame on the part of the company. He directed that Duke's appeal costs should be paid out of public funds.