VOSA gives green light to tacho deregulation
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By David Wilcox TACHOGRAPH CENTRES will be allowed to set their own fees for calibrating and checking tachographs from next month.
Following an industry consultation, VOSA has decided that it no longer needs to cap tacho fees and that it is better to let the market decide what a fair fee should be. But its consultation document forecasts that the cost of two-yearly checks will rise by about 41% in the case of digital tachographs and by 90% for analogue instruments.
“Deregulation will beneit the industry, giving tachograph centres the opportunity to recoup costs while providing a more lexible service to the customers,” says VOSA chief executive Alastair Peoples.
Fees for calibration and the six-yearly inspection are both capped at £46 (excluding VAT) and the two-yearly check can be no more than £32 for an analogue tachograph and £46 for digital versions. But a timing exercise carried out by VOSA showed that these fees are no longer commercially viable and that the caps needed to be higher.
Unless there was a substantial increase, VOSA feared that some of the 540 tachograph centres would pull out of the network. It calculated that capped fees for analogue tachographs would need to rise by about 110%, while those for digital tachographs would rise by 32% for calibration and by 57% for two-yearly checks. Under deregulation, “fees can be reasonably expected not to be as high as the capped fees”, says VOSA.
Freight Transport Association head of road freight and enforcement policy James Firth says operators have doubts. “Deregulation is ine where there are competitive markets.
“At a recent road freight council meeting the concern was that there are plenty of areas of the country where calibration centres may have a monopoly. The [response] was ‘let’s not ix the price’ but there has to be recognition, a cap, for the areas where there is no competition.”