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Weighty tips from Derby experts

15th June 1973, Page 85
15th June 1973
Page 85
Page 86
Page 85, 15th June 1973 — Weighty tips from Derby experts
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

Tipper operators who take advice from enforcement officers can stay out of trouble, but enforcement effort is still too thinly spread to stop the deliberate overloader

by Gordon Crabtree: pictures by Harry Roberts

A COUNTY with far more tippers than most, because of its many quarries, Derbyshire enforces the legal loading of vehicles with an iron hand in a velvet glove. At least that is the impression I have gained after talking to enforcement authorities and operators in the county.

The county trading standards officer, Mr E. J. Waller, told me that his department gladly gave advice on any queries concerning vehicle loading and that this, together with the practice of issuing both verbal and written cautions to tipper operators, had achieved an excellent degree of co-operation.

He revealed that in the period April 1 1972 to mid-March 1973 there were 34 prosecutions of owners and 24 of drivers involving the overloading of quarry tippers, while prosecutions for overloaded tippers on colliery or opencast coal traffic numbered only eight against owners and five against drivers. In respect of overloaded tippers working on other than quarry or colliery traffic there were only 17 prosecutions against owners and five against drivers throughout Derbyshire during the period.

Against this, 221 cautions were issued concerning overloaded tippers during that same period.

Persistent offenders, however, cannot expect to enjoy the velvet touch. Warnings by officials, on the spot or by letter, generally concern the occasional and not very serious overload. Whether or not an offence is met with a caution or a prosecution also depends very much on the history of the operator.

Discretion

Mr Waller told me that weights and measures examiners who made regular checks within the county area were careful to look at the record of tipper firms or individual operators before coming to a decision about recommending legal action. In short, the enforcement officers have a considerable amount of discretion — but where a tipper operator has a bad history or has grossly overloaded a vehicle, a prosecution is virtually automatic.

Derbyshire County Council's trading standard department feels that by far the most effective deterrent to overloading is the issuing of a GV160, obliging a driver or operator to reduce the vehicle's load to the legal limit before allowing it to proceed. This usually means sending up another vehicle to take part of the load and with a cargo of grain, for example, overloaded on several axles, this could take several hours. The ultimate cost to the operator results in a financial loss rather than extra profit from risking overloading.

Mr Waller, admitting that, despite the efforts of enforcement officers, tipper overloading was still too prevalent, was critical of those who undercut competitors by serious overloading in order to make higher profits and gain business from the majority of tipper operators who made every effort to work within the law. His department takes a very poor view of these deliberate overloaders and they can expect a very close scrutiny of their operating history whenever one of their vehicles is stopped and found to be overloaded — whether grossly or on one axle.

A tremendous fall in the number of overloading cases would, he believes, be achieved if more vehicles were fitted with a built-in weighing device showing the overall load and the weight per axle. He told me that to his knowledge there were at least seven reputable engineering companies who produced such equipment — costing on average about 2 per cent of the total price of the vehicle. For instance, on a large articulated outfit the extra cost would be about £.180 while on a 16-ton tipper it would be about .£80.

Someone who, on the operating side, also favours the fitting of weighing devices — but for a rather different reason — is Mr W. H. Carroll, a director of Evers; this company is not only a bulk haulier and storage specialist but is a private tip owner. Evers has depots in London, Birmingham, Nottingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

Mr Carroll believes that the compulsory fitting of axle-weighing devices would give the driver exact knowledge of the loading situation, and the responsibility for overloading would then rest fairly and squarely on the driver of the vehicle.

Mr Carroll emphasized to me that even companies who issued frequent advice and warnings to their employees on various aspects of the law still found themselves prosecuted and fined for the negligence or laziness of one of their drivers. He is critical of the present practice by which prosecution of the employer is almost automatic for breaches of the regulations which are really within the control of the driver.

Penalties He would also like to see some agreed tolerance on the individual axle and gross vehicle weights, to allow an operator who is only marginally overloaded some relief from the penalties of the present legislation. But he agreed that in this respect most enforcement officers were very reasonable and seldom proceeded with a prosecution unless a vehicle was overloaded to a degree which was outside any reasonable tolerance.

Mr Carroll is at one with Mr Waller in thinking that far too many overloading offenders escape unpenalized. There are, he says, far too few enforcement officers — a problem that will be with us for a long time — and this situation encourages drivers and operators to believe that the risk of being caught is fairly small. He thinks it would be a big help in checking this type of illegal operation if the owners of quarries and similar sites were made liable as accessories in law if they allowed vehicles to leave their premises loaded in excess of their gross plated weight.

On the other hand, another operator to whom I spoke was insistent that very few vehicles nowadays came out of Derbyshire quarries overloaded. Mr Bob Wyatt, a director of Bulk Tippers Ltd, of Stockport, Cheshire, said that weighbridges were extremely accurate and most quarries in the Derbyshire area would turn a vehicle back even if it was only a couple of hundredweights over the permitted load. On the other hand, he had heard convincing evidence of operators carrying stone direct from railyards in the Manchester area overloaded by as much as 10 tons. This was not so much a reaction against the commercial threat of habitual rate-cutters and overloaders as to ensure that their own contracts were a paying proposition.

Rogue tipper operators were, he thought, now discovering that gross overloading could be an expensive business in the long run.

Understanding Mr Wyatt agreed that weights and measures officials and DoE examiners showed great understanding of the practical problems of weight distribution; and he thought that if built-in weighing devices were made a legal requirement the result would be a much fairer deal all round.

His own company, Bulk Tippers, is a tipper agency using some 30 to 40 tippers conveying many kinds of material, from soil to quarry rock, in the Derbyshire and Cheshire areas. The majority are small operators, with perhaps one or two vehicles, employed by the agency, and he did not recall any overloading incidents involving these operators.

In the course of discussions with other operators, with a police official and a representative of the DoE's North Western traffic area I found confirmation that, even if there is no overloading tolerance in the literal sense, there is a remarkable fund of tolerance and understanding by those who have to try to administer and enforce the law.

This is a sensible approach to a difficult situation, but while appreciating this, reputable operators are unquestionably concerned that the thin spread of enforcement is enabling the blatant overloader to remain a constant threat to their business and a danger to the industry and the public.


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