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Widespread fiddles
Page 6
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by Insider
A change in the law to make isolator switches magic buttons an offence for electronic tachographs needs urgent consideration
N THE LATEST Annual Report of the Licensing Authorities, Metropolitan Licensing Authority Air Vice-Marshal Ronald Ashford says that they ought to be wary about concentrating too much on the weighing of vehicles. Commenting on the enforcement effort in his area, he said they had had a number of serious hours and records Offences during the year. That was an area which needs greater attention because he suspected that the abuse of those rules is more widespread than was realised.
That timely warning seems to have been borne out by very worrying evidence in the case of Cheshire haulier Stanley Fernyhough, who has just been jailed for nine months for conspiring with drivers to falsity tachograph charts.
The case centred around the use of isolator switches to interrupt the operation of the electronic tachographs in Fernyhough's vehicles, something which apparently is known among drivers as the "magic button'. The use of such switches is almost undetectable, without a massive programme of silent checks by enforcement officers.
In the Fernyhough case it came to light when the driver of a vehicle involved in an accident was, according to his tachograph chart, in the middle of a rest period at the time.
What was worrying was the evidence about how widespread the use of such switches was in the industry, coupled with the fact of how difficult it can be to find them.
One of Fernyhough's drivers told the court that it was possible to interfere with any tachograph, but that electronic tachographs were the easiest to interfere with. He knew "a bit about fiddling tachographs... you pick it up." He said that a lot of drivers fiddled their tachographs. They had to in order to make a living.
Even more worrying was evidence given by a member of the staff of Volvo agent Hartshorne (Potteries) Ltd, of Newcastle-Under-Lyme, that they were not surprised to find isolator switches when vehicles went in for servicing and repair, as their use was widespread in the industry. The most common way of installing such switches was to break into the centre cable and divert part of the wiring via a switch in the cab. Some switches were concealed in the bottom of the ashtray. In other cases, the wires were led to a little used switch, such as a map reading light switch.
In talking about the difficulties of locating such switches, it was said that if a haulier, who had worked on a vehicle himself, sent it in for the tachograph to be resealed, no check would be made for hidden switches. All that would be done would be a quick visual check. If an isolator switch had been put in carefully, the odds were that it would not be found. Neither would any other tachograph station find it, it was maintained.
There were a number of ways of hiding isolator switches which were very, very hard to find_ The only way to be sure would be to strip out the whole electrical system. They just looked in the obvious places, and if they did not find an isolator switch, they resealed the tachograph.
That evidence was more or less confirmed by the company's senior manager, who said that it was quite common in the haulage industry for tachographs to be interfered with, by what the drivers called 'magic buttons'.
Licensing Authorities, quite rightly, take a very serious view of the commission of such offences, as evidenced by the recent decision of South Eastern LA Brigadier Michael Turner, to curtail the licence of Hythe-based Roland Barton Transport, from 12 vehicles to six. Two of the drivers involved were also dealt with, one being warned and the other having his heavy goods vehicle driving licence suspended for tachograph offences.
However, the problem would appear to be one of detection. If the use oi such switches is as widespread as was suggested in the Fernyhough case, then it makes a nonsense of the drivers' hours rules, and the implications of that, from a public safety point of view, are horrendous.
The words of the judge who imposed prison sentences in a similar case of falsification some years ago, involving a company called Charter Roadways Ltd put in a nutshell the dangers, when he said that deliberately and for gain the company and those who ran it diced with the safety of the public by allocating work to drivers they knew could not be done within the permitted hours limits. The company had gained work at the expense of competing hauliers working within the law. Honest men had to be protected.
The other major difficulty facing enforcement officers is the current legislation. Surprisingly enough, it is not an offence as such to fit such switches, only to use them. What does an enforcement officer do, if he confronts a driver, having discovered such a switch, only to be told "I only use it abroad and not in this country"?
The Fernyhough case, following Air Vice-Marshal Ashford's comments, has once again emphasised the importance of the need to devote a high proportion of enforcement resources to the detection of offences of tachograph falsification and drivers' hours abuse, despite the fact that such cases are notoriously difficult to prove.
The one sure way to detect such offences is by the use of the silent check, in which enforcement officers note down the registration numbers of vehicles passing a particular place at a particular time and day. A resultant check on the tachograph chart for that vehicle for that day will show whether the driver has been "running bent" or not.
The problem is that all falsifications are done for one object alone, and that is to enable the driver to drive longer hours than he is permitted to. That almost inevitably means that charts are going to be falsified at unsocial hours, for example late on Sunday or during the night. That has overtime payment implications at least as far as the Department of Transport's own enforcement staff are concerned. The solution may well lie in targeting specific resources, both in manpower and funding, for the detection of such wrongdoing.
Ultimately, if it is as easy to fiddle the electronic tachograph as is suggested, and it as difficult to detect as is also suggested, then it might be time that consideration was given to some other form of the automatic recording of drivers' hours. Certainly, a change in the legislation to make having an isolator switch an offence requires urgent consideration.
The official line that the falsification of tachographs is not widespread is becoming increasingly discredited, and a determined effort is required if such abuse is to be stamped out. If it is not, then honest hauliers, who find they are losing contracts owing to rate cutting by those who ac cocking a snook at the law, will be tempted to tread the same path in order to compete. It becomes a matter of survival. Such a situation is in nobody's interests, and least of all in the interests of an industry that is fighting to improve its poor public image.