could sell to the lorry men
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THE Minister of Transport could stand a better chance of getting tachographs accepted if his Transport Bill expressed more confidence in these pieces of machinery as a modern aid to efficiency.
One gets the impression that the Minister does in fact want tachographs to be viewed as a tool of modern business management, with much the same philosophy as introduces computers to modern accounting.
Yet tachographs, as the transport law envisages them, will not be the aids to efficiency that they might be. They will be mere nuisance-infested appendages of a records-keeping system made even more cumbersome by the law being enacted.
Little wonder that many operators distrust tachographs and drivers positively hate them. Instead of simplifying records keeping, tachographs will make it more complicated.
Tachographs could represent a wonderful opportunity for raising efficiency if only the new law allowed it. There would have been a good chance of even the drivers accepting tachographs if they had absolved the need for separate records keeping. But they have not. Records of driving and working time will still have to be logged—and on special official forms, which could well be additional to the logsheets used by many corn panies to record other items such as loads, fuel consumption and wage calculations at the same time. What a mess. It is often no simple task even now filling in logsheets.
And if only tachographs had been intro
duced as strict guardians of a much simpler law on driving hours. But no, the hours rules are made even more complicated and so will increase the risk of their being flouted. There are going to be fun and games.working out 22-hour days (the Transport Bill's new basis for drivers' hours) for a start. Then there is the limit of 60 hours' work a week; and the stipulation that there be 24 continuous hours' rest every week. The transport working week will begin at midnight, Sunday morning—by law. It is inviting transgression of the law and making practical enforcement extremely difficult when it is attempted to tie up legally so many details.
It would not be so bad if the new laws on drivers' hours had any scientific backing, but they have not. Scandalously, they are based on mere hunches. And through being too preoccupied with quantity licensing the industry has let the Government get away with this shabby legislation.
If it were felt that some reduction in driving time would indeed bring safety benefits it was not necessary to try and tie every conceivable loose-end. A 9-hour limit would probably have been accepted by the industry without much dissension if the rule had been made perfectly clear-cut and the 9 hours had been just plain and simple driving time—moving time. Tachographs would then have been a wonderful method of checking a simple law. Separate written records and expensive silent checks would have been made redundant overnight. Both operating and enforcement costs could havi tumbled overnight. .
The only other important element in nee( of legal control is resting time. Spreadover and total hours of employment would ther have taken care of themselves. All that wa: needed was a stipulation that 10, 11 or 1: hours of rest be taken in each 24 hours. Th( ordinary clock-in cards provide the contra over that.
Without the carrot of simpler law or drivers' hours, what hope is there of tachographs being accepted without a fight? For the time being the Minister seems to have been able to 'subdue the recent bout of unofficial strikes over tachographs—which was surprising considering the doubtful arguments the Ministry propounded. "Oh, don't worry about the Bill", was the Ministry line. "The bit about tachographs is only an enabling clause. The proper law will be in regulations, and there'll be the fullest consultation beforehand, of course." Of course. It is a pity there has not been much consultation up to now, because these "enabling" clauses in the Bill will be very hard to shift once they are in an Act. As tachographs are inevitably linked with drivers' hours it is a pity the details of hours were not "left to later regulations" as well. As it is, no bargaining room has been left.
Also, it was hardly honest to fob off the unions with the statement that "in any case it will probably take manufacturers 12 months to organize mass production of tachographs". They are already in mass production on the Continent, which is where all the British tachographs are coming from in any case. In fact, enforcement of tachographs, at £50 a time, is not going to do Britain's import bill any good, at all, so. far as I can see.
. Anyhow, is a complicated tachograph needed? They are not the most reliable of instruments. They are subject to human error, such as drivers losing keys. They are expensive. If hours records still have to be written out, what is really going to be the value of tachographs so far as law enforcement is concerned? As a double check? In that case, checks on speed and distance as well as time are really superfluous, strictly speaking. All that the law should require, as a minimum, is a clockwork mechanism which just records time, and the proportion of running time—in other words an ordinary Servis recorder as is often used already.
There would not be such intense driverdislike of that. There is, in fact, something in the drivers' fears of full-blooded tachographs. The outsiders' view is that if drivers are doing their job properly they should have no objection to tachographs. But this opinion fails to appreciate the psychology of the professional lorry driver, who is usually an enthusiast for his job and who stakes a lot on the feeling of freedom and independence it engenders. Enlightened companies give drivers plenty of incentives to do their job properly without the aid of a tachograph to record every detail. Also, tachographs as a means of law enforcement could be sinister. It is but a short step to speeding convictions based simply on the evidence of a tachograph. Big Brother indeed,