Maintenance has to be monitored
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• Birmingham
based City Waste's licence authorisation has increased from 15 vehicles and 15 trailers to 25 vehicles and 10 trailers, but West Midland Licensing Authority John Mervyn Pugh has cut the duration so that it expires at the end of the year instead of at the end of January 1997.
For the company, Michael Carless said that it was accepted that there had been a hiccup over maintenance. There had been a tremendous increase in turnover recently and the maintenance system was unable to cope with the growth. The accounts indicated that the problem was not financial.
Mervyn Pugh said that the company's maintenance record was not good. He was worried about increasing the fleet when the company had not demonstrated it could properly run what it had got.
Carless said that fines of £1,500 for overloading and the unauthorised use of a vehicle had been paid in full.
The problems arose when the company hired a vehicle to cover work to be done by a new artic. The hired vehicle was used for longer than a month without specifying it on the company's licence. ID solve the overloading problem, £3,000 had been spent on installing weighing equip
ment on the machine used to load the vehicles.
Director Paul Richardson said that there had been no problem over maintenance until January. It was an impressive fleet in terms of the vehicles—the last vehicle they had purchased had cost £115,000. There were 14 vehicles and five trailers in possession, and the company needed an extra five vehicles because it was tendering for additional contracts. He would be prepared tc put all the vehicles and trailers through fresh tests.
Granting the increase on condition that the company's fleet went through extra tests, Mervyn Pugh said he bore in mind that none of the prohibitions issued had been endorsed as showing a significant maintenance failure. He was cutting the licence duration so that he could be satisfied the vehicles were being maintained properly after a short time.