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by Keith Vincent
Still unfinished
A YEAR AGO, under the title "Unfinished tacho business", I showed that the Government had still not met all the legislative requirements, even though four years had passed since Parliament adopted the basic legislation. In the past 12 months there has been some progress. But there is still more to be done.
I am not talking about the prolonged negotiations to revise the regulation and its parent dealing with drivers' hours. They seem to be staggering towards a conclusion in the next 12 months. But they are irrelevant to the topics dealt with in this article.
First comes unauthorised repair and re-conditioning of tachographs. With unusual clarity the EEC Regulation says starkly that they "may be installed or repaired only by fitters or workshops approved by the competent authorities of the Member States" — which in Britain means the Department of Transport.
The DTp has approved 476 tachograph centres for installation, calibration and recalibration of tachographs. These could legally carry out major repairs, though in practice they normally send instruments in need of such treatment back to the manufacturers.
But there are also many unauthorised firms offering reconditioned tachographs for sale. As I pointed out last year, the EEC law does not lay down penalties for non-compliance. This has to be done in supplementary national legislation. And this gave the DTp a problem.
For it could hardly expect Parliament to be happy with legislation imposing fines
simply for restoring a broken tachograph to working order. The fact that this would be done at the behest of the EEC would just add to the political difficulty.
During the five years since Parliament approved the basic tachograph legislation, the DTp has sat on its hands hoping that the problem would go away. Instead, it has grown. More and more working tachographs are becoming available from scrapped vehicles. The instruments are often younger than the vehicles in which they were installed during the belated, and therefore rushed, retrospective fitment period of 1980-81. It would be wasteful to scrap them.
Some of the repairs are carried out by former employees of the approved stations who have been through the manufacturers' training courses. These repairs are usually technically, if not legally, satisfactory. But inevitably there are others whose standards are lower. One tachograph manufacturer has compiled a "Black Museum" of faulty repairs, some of which were even sent back to them for repair under warranty!
As CM's news pages show, the courts are imposing very heavy fines for hours and tachograph offences. The DTp's new semi-automatic readers are as effective in their field as the dynamic axle weighers are in theirs. And in both fields accuracy is vital. The DTp desperately wants to shield the tachograph from the doubts about accuracy which have affected axle weighers.
So last month it issued a consultation document. This states frankly that the DTp "is not inclined to introduce a penalty for repairing a tachograph without authorisation". Nor does the Department favour authorising repairers other than the manufacturers or the existing centres. And it reveals that the manufacturers themselves have never been authorised to repair tachographs!
The DTp therefore proposes to put the responsibility onto the approved centres. If the scheme goes ahead as planned it will be an offence, with fines of up to £2,000, or two years imprisonment, for an unauthorised person to seal a tachograph or fix an installation plaque. There will also be other minor changes including, seven years late, authorising the manufacturers as repairers.
The result would be that approved centres could install and seal tachographs which had been repaired by nonauthorised firms, so long as the centre is prepared to take responsibility and to offer a 12month warranty.
That is a step along the road to dealing with the problem. Whether it will work is more doubtful. And it does not seem to comply with the very specific requirements of the EEC Regulation, since it will still enable unauthorised persons to repair the instruments. The DTp has to consult the EEC Commission on this sort of matter, and I suspect that more will be heard of it.
There is also a messy situation about the other piece of last year's unfinished business, the two-year test. True this came into force in the middle of the year. But it has to be done at approved tachograph centres, whereas the FTA had wanted it to become part of the annual hgv test.
The role of the test stations is to check that the two-year
check has been carried out. It seems clear that this is not being done. But when DTp officials are asked about this there is a certain amount of foot-shuffling and throatclearing, and a marked tendency to try to change the subject.
The only official explanation given is that the two-year test is an introductory phase, and that it will be all right on the night. But unofficially it is rumoured that the test station staff will want more pay for carrying out an extended test, and that this will mean another rise in the test fee. That at least is a real problem. But more bizarre reasons are also heard — for example, that not all instruments can be opened far enough to enable the tester to see the plaque!
Since this process comes at the end of the chain of installation, calibration and testing it all seems rather futile. It must cast further doubt on the DTp's commitment to applying EEC legislation.
However, all this is nothing to the situation in the Irish Republic. It is said that the throughput figures of the approved tachograph stations in that country show most lorries have not even had tachographs installed. Even those which are in place are not being used. Only lorries making international journeys seem to take the legislation at all seriously.
The EEC Commission did not take Ireland to the European Court in 1978 because, unlike Britain, Ireland agreed to comply. That was a smart move. But although Dublin introduced all the neccessary legislation it is simply not being enforced. In Ireland tachograph business is not so much unfinished as barely started.