Gilders guilty on hours
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• Winchcombe livestock haulier Gilders Transport and 12 of its drivers have been fined almost 2,500 for drivers' hours and tachograph offences. and the unauthorised use of vehicles.
Appealing before the North Cotswolds magistrates the drivers admitted 68 offences of exceeding the hours limits, taking insufficient rest and breaks, and three offences of failing to make entries on the centre field of a tachograph chart. The company admitted permitting the offences by the drivers, plus 21 offences of unauthorised use.
Edward Lyons, prosecuting for the Western Traffic Area, said a check on Gilders' tachograph charts revealed a considerable number of offences in a seven-week period between October and December 1989.
The company had fully taken up the authorisation on its licence, and then operated additional vehicles.
Defending, Geoffrey Williams said that the haulage of livestock posed particular problems over hours as drivers often faced conflict between compliance with the regulations and the welfare of the animals.
It was not a case of deliberate and flagrant large scale breaches of the regulations; there had been many minor breaches consistent with driv ers pressing on to reach decent facilities for their animals. They would have had a defence if they had recorded on the back of the charts the reason they had departed from the rules, but the drivers were not clerical men and that was part of the reason they were before the court.
The 21 occasions when vehicles were used which were not authorised did not necessarily mean that the company had used more vehicles than it was legally entitled to, said Williams. Gilders had forgotten to notify the Licensing Authority when vehicles were taken off the road and other vehicles hired in; it was an administrative failure.
Two drivers were given a conditional discharge for 12 months; the other 10 were fined between £20 and £205 with £10 costs.
Gilders Transport was fined £1,540 with £1,000 costs.