Adding time periods
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We operate a large fleet of vehicles from different depots around the UK. Sometimes a vehicle is transferred temporarily to a depot in a different Traffic Area for a month or two.
A traffic examiner told us that if a vehicle goes to another depot for two months, returns here for a month and then goes back to the other depot, it would have to be specified on the other depot's licence and taken off our licence.
He said that a vehicle is allowed to be based in another area for three months and that includes gaps in between. Was he correct?
No. The time
between the periods of attachment at another depot is not included.
Section 61(2) of the Transport Act 1968 states that an Operator's Licence does not authorise the use of a vehicle unless the place which is, for the time being, its operating centre is in the area of the LA who issued the licence, or is outside that area and has not been that vehicle's operating centre for more than three months.
In the latter case two or more successive periods separated from each other by an interval of less than three months shall be treated as a single period.
Note that it is the periods of use outside the area at another operating centre which have to be added together. The time between them is referred to as an interval and not a period, and does not have to be included in the calculations.
Bear in mind too that it is only use at the same operating centre outside the home Traffic Area which has to be totalled. If, when used outside its base area, a vehicle was attached to depots in different Traffic Areas, or to different depots in the same Traffic Area, those periods would not have to be added together.
So if your vehicles are regularly being used from the same depot in another Traffic Area, those periods will have to be added together unless separated by a three-month interval.
When the total exceeds three months the vehicles would cease to be authorised on the home licence. It is possible, of course, that the vehicles could be used under the hiring margin of the other depot's Operator's Licence, if it had one.