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Hours not to reason
Page 3
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• "If you reduce your break to less than 45 minutes then you'd better be careful ..." That's how one leading tachograph expert views the current fiasco over how the courts should interpret the drivers hours law. "Rolling Programme" or "Wipe-the-slate-clean" — take your pick. You'd think that 12 years after tachographs became compulsory it would be possible to have a clear law on the subject.
Wipe-the-slate-clean seems like a good idea at first glance. But if you take it to its illogical conclusion you could drive for 15 minutes, rest for 15, drive for 15 again, then rest for another 15, then drive for four hours solid, rest for 15, then drive another 41/2 hours straight; so across 81/2 hours driving you'd only have had 15 minutes rest. That doesn't make sense, and that's exactly what Lancashire police experts said when they prosecuted hauliers applying a wipe-the-slate interpretation. But it seems there is doubt about the rolling programme interpretation too, so the whole thing has been sent back to the European Court of Justice for a definitive interpretation.
So we're giving the law back to the very people who drafted it in the first place, namely legal experts. The same people who can turn a simple will or contract into complete gobble-degook with assorted hithertotherefores, thereafters, restrictive convenants, relevant clauses and parties of the first parts.
And they must be the last people you'd want to interpret the drivers hours rules. Surely the solution can't be that difficult to find? Why not simply say that after any accumulated driving period of 4/2 hours you must take a minimum of 45 minutes rest, regardless of whether you have taken any break in between that period of driving? And any driver who wants to drive for 41/2 hours straight needs his head examining.