FedEx admits hours offences
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• A series of drivers hours and tachograph offences has cost Federal Express (UK) £1,870 in fines and costs.
Appearing before Rochdale magistrates FedEx admitted 25 offences of failing to produce tachograph charts, 22 offences of using vehicles when the mode switch of the tachograph was not operated correctly and eight offences of permitting drivers to exceed 41/2 hours driving without taking 45 minutes of break. No evidence was offered by the prosecution about another 321 alleged offences.
Last February 39 drivers at the company's Rochdale depot were ordered to pay fines and costs totalling £2,880 after pleading guilty to 217 offences (CM 8-14 March).
Stephen Sargent, prosecuting, said that last July police officers obtained a large number of charts from the Rochdale depot. When they were checked gaps were found of up to 616km. Drivers had driven for as much as 7hr 18min without taking the required break; in other cases they had failed to use the mode switch to record rest.
In all 11 notices to drivers were found in a total of 742 packets of charts and nine of these related to the drawing of on and off duty lines — something that was not required by the regulations. Only one of the notices related to hours offences.
For Federal Express John Backhouse said that the company had never been convicted previously of any similar offences. Its system for checking charts had broken down to some extent in 1989 when it lost staff responsible for that task and there was a gap before they were replaced.
It was accepted that during that period the standard of the checks had declined and a pattern of offences by some drivers had began to develop which the company ought to have become aware of.
If drivers did not use the mode switch the employer automatically committed an offence. A substantial part of FedEx's activities was the collection and delivery of parcels, and it had always been recognised that the use of mode switches was a problem with such operations. A total of 18 of the 23 offences of failing to produce charts related to agency drivers whose charts had not found their way back to the company. It was always a problem with agency drivers, as the law required a driver to keep his current week's charts plus the last chart for the previous week, and he was not required to hand them in for 21 days.