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Absolute discharge for Pandoro
Page 22
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• P & 0 subsidiary Pandoro and its driver William Freshney have been given absolute discharges by the Newbury magistrates after they admitted to using a vehicle with dangerous parts.
The court heard that the front nearside wheel of a semitrailer driven by Freshney came off within a kilometre of his departure from the Chieveley service area where he had taken a 40 minute break. The inner wheel was also found to be detached from its studs. John Backhouse, defending, argued that if neither the company nor Freshney were to be blamed it was either a case of the lost wheel phenomenon' or someone had tried to steel the tyres while the vehicle was at Chieveley and had been disturbed while loosening the nuts.
Freshney gave evidence that he had picked the trailer up from Pandoro's Liverpool corn
pound and that the wheel nuts had been checked by a mechanic before the vehicle was allowed to leave. He had spent the night at Newcastle-underLyme and had checked the vehicle over visually before setting off for Newbury. There had been no sign of rust marks or of weeping to indicate that the nuts might be loose, but the vehicle had been out of sight while at Chieveley.
Assistant fleet engineer James Boyd said that because of problems with wheel loss throughout the country, the company has adopted a 610 Nm torque setting for all its wheel nuts, that being a middle-of-the-road setting that appeared to be satisfactory. This was the first instance of one of the company's vehicles losing a wheel. If all the nuts were loose a nearside wheel would come off quickly and the vehicle could not have travelled as far as Newbury without losing the wheel if the nuts had been loose when it left either Liverpool or Newcastle-underLyme.
Backhouse produced copies of Commercial Motor reports of Crown Court cases where judges had indicated that where there was no blame on the part of the defendents an absolute or conditional discharge was the appropriate penalty.