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COMMENT
Page 9
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Testing times...
Why do some people feel honour bound to meddle with drivers' hours legislation? And at the risk of sounding distinctly 'Europhobic', why are they often MEPS or unelected Eurocrats? Considering that politicians should only do what the electorate tells them (well, that's the theory at least), we can't recall UK truck operators damouring for changes to the drivers' hours regs.
The current EU rules are already complicated enough—the last thing we need is another system that nobody will understand. Our advice is to call your MEP (they're listed on the internet) and tell him to stop meddling with the law,
last week Commercial Motor speculated that the root cause of the high level of annual test failures was that operators were too bone idle to put their trucks through a pre-test. Talk about lighting the blue touch paper—the calls came in thick and fast, accusing us of being "unjust", "focused on the wrong issue" and in the case of one reader talking
"absolute codswallop!".
Judging by these comments there are clearly other reasons why HGVs are failing the test and it's not all down to poor preparation. Every one of our callers had put a vehicle through the pre-test successfully, only to have it fail the real thing soon afterwards (in one case the following day). Something is clearly going wrong and the VI needs to act swiftly before hauliers get the impression that the only reward for diligence and pre-testing is a failure.