BDS jumped the gun
Page 20
If you've noticed an error in this article please click here to report it so we can fix it.
• A Staffordshire haulier and two of its drivers, have been ordered to pay over £2,000 in fines and costs for a series of offences including the unauthorised use of vehicles. They were said to have jumped the gun because of delays in obtaining an 0 licence.
Mark Cooper of Kidsgrove, managing director of Stoke-onTrent-based Brick Delivery Services admitted 17 offences before the Fenton magistrates of using vehicles without an 0-licence, four offences of failing to produce tachograph records and two of overloading. He was fined £60 per offence and ordered to pay £75 prosecution costs, a total of 21,445.
The company admitted seven offences of using vehicles without an 0 licnece and was fined a total of 2480. Driver Graham Braithwaite admitted two overloading offences, being fined 230 per offence with £25 costs. Driver Kerry Cooke admitted one offence of failing to take sufficient daily rest and was fined E30 with £25 costs.
Patrick McKnight, prosecuting, said a 38-tonne artic was seen not to be displaying an 0-licence disc when stopped in a Kent weight check. The vehicle was weighed and was found to have a gross overload of 1,620kg (some 9.5%) and the permitted train weight had been exceeded by 2,940kg (some 7.7%), Tachograph records were sent for and these showed that Cooper initially, and then the company, had been operating some six vehicles without a licence from January through to May. There were also gaps in the tacho records produced.
Defending, John Backhouse said it took over three months for a licence application to be processed. Cooper had decided to go into haulage and had qualified himself. Vehicles were obtained on lease and, to put it bluntly, he had jumped the gun.
Proper records had been kept which proved the offences when produced to the traffic examiners, said Backhouse. If Cooper had wanted to be dishonest he would have destroyed those records. The missing charts had been genuinely lost. It was not a case of an attempt to hide other offences.
Bricks did not normally vary in weight and were loaded by number. The overloading offences arose when bricks were collected from a particular brickworks for the first time and no indication was given that they might be heavier than normal. Though overloaded as far as this country was concerned, the artic had been well within its design weights.