VI weighing figures anger its own staff
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by Karen Miles • The Vehicle Inspectorate has been accused of "cooking the books" by its own staff after completing a mass vehicle weighing programme which produced minimal prosecutions.
The allegations surround a month-long weighing blitz in the Eastern Traffic Area where 7,067 vehicles were weighed in October last year.
The figure, which has just emerged, represents well over a five-fold increase on the month before and previous months.
The mass weighing was in response to demands from the VI's head office to increase activity so that the executive agency can hit national weighing target figures promised to the VI's paymaster, the Department of Transport.
Included in the VI figures are thousands of the vehicles weighed at British Sugar weighbridges—at factories which already impose a strict regime of weighing all vehicles and penalising overloads.
One of British Sugar's four factories in the region this week said only 0.7% of vehicles arriving on site were more than 3% overloaded.
The VI this week agreed that prohibitions and prosecutions from October's weighings "were not that high" and admitted that prosecution results are never expected to be good when there are large scale weighings.
The figures have drawn attack from enforcement staff, who claim that the weighings represent bad targeting of enforcement and uneven and "desperately bad enforcement".
One says: "It just means that they're just using all of the British Sugar's weighings as their own."
Although October is the start of the sugar beet season, the weighing of 7,067 HGVs in one month in the Eastern Traffic Area compares to a total of 1,323 HGVs weighed in the region for the whole of the previous October and 1,094 HGVs weighed in the previous month.
The Western Traffic Area has a total of around 25,000 vehicles to weigh for the year ending April 1995.
Since October British Sugar has installed a regime at its UK factories which delays hauliers which are more than 3% overloaded. It also withdraws farmers' permits to enter the factory. Few charges from weighings.