INTEREST?
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shhh listen carefully and you'll here the gentle rustling of skeletons as they prepare to tumble headlong out of hauliers' cupboards across the length and breadth of the country. The Department of Transport is planning to make the safety records of truck and bus operators available to the general public (see page 8) and if the DOT gets its way, by the end of the year, Mrs Prodnose will be able to find out all about your accident records, convictions for road traffic offences and annual test failures by dialling a Vehicle Inspectorate hotline. And why not? Well for a start the one question the VI needs to answer is: Will hauliers be given the same rights as Mrs Prodnose when it comes to the rehabilitation of offenders? In short, how long will details of their past misdemeanors be kept on the VI's computers? Under the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act the Mrs Prodnoses of this world are protected by quite specific criteria. If you're given an absolute discharge for an offence you don't have to declare it after six months. For a fine or community service it's five years. For a prison sentence of six months or less it's seven years. If your sentence is up to Iwo and a half years the waiting limit is 10 years. How will hauliers' records be treated? Would the wellbehaved operator up for a licence renewal find it opposed by Mrs Prodnose armed with old, and by now irrelevant, vehicle prohibition details collected over five years ago? Arns one senior transport lawyer told Commercial Motor, "It's symbolic of the desire of governent to effect enforcement by external panic!" It certainly begs the question who should be deciding on whether an operator is fit to hold a licence—the Traffic Commissioner, or the Traffic Commissioner backed, and indeed prompted, by Mrs Prodnose? If an operator isn't fit to be licensed because of his past record then he shouldn't have one now.
If the VI is going to reveal test failure rates it must also say why a truck has failed. There's a world of difference between failing an MOT because of a dud bulb—and failing it because your brakes aren't working. Without that information Mrs Prodnose and her net-curtain gestapo are likely to tar every haulier with the same brush of gross neglect. If the DOT is going to let hauliers' skeletons flop out of the cupboard then we really ought to know why they were in there.