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No gain without pain

24th March 2005, Page 40
24th March 2005
Page 40
Page 41
Page 40, 24th March 2005 — No gain without pain
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Which of the following most accurately describes the problem?

Do VOSAs performance targets put undue

pressure on examiners to bump up the number

of prohibitions issued? Pat Hagan reports.

N0 SELF-RESPECTING truck operator would condone the rogues who deliberately flout the rules and regulations on road safety.After all, it only takes one high-profile case involving one cowboy to eclipse all the good work done by hundreds of law-abiding operators.

But there are some in the road transport industry who question how well the enforcement agencies differentiate between the two.

The issue of over-zealous activity by those charged with implementing road safety policies has come up many times before.

Yet the latest concerns appear to emanate not from disgruntled hauliers but insiders at the Vehicle Operator Services Agency itself.

Sources close to VOSA suggest some traffic examiners may be coming under intense pressure from management to notch up as many offences as they can.

One examiner is reported to have been berated by his managers for not issuing enough prohibitions to bump up end-of-year performance. The criticism followed a day of roadside checks that resulted in the impounding of two vehicles, out of 30 stopped.

Such is the sensitivity of the issue that the examiner is unwilling to speak publicly. But transport lawyers say the feedback they get from clients suggests that over-zealous enforcement by VOSA staff continues to be a problem.

"I have been in this industry for 12 years and over the Past couple I've seen a lot more minor matters resulting in prohibitions and summonses?' says transport lawyer Paul Atkinson, from Exeter-based firm Over,Taylor, Biggs.

"I had a client a few weeks ago who was stopped and found to be one day over on his MoT," he adds.-Because that was a prohibition issue it resulted in a magistrates' summons that we then managed to get withdrawn after making representations.

Lack of discretion

They were charging him with using a vehicle with no MOT, whereas in the old days he probably would have had a warning and that would be it," Atkinson remarks.

"My view is that more prohibitions are being issued than in the past and the discretion that would have been used to sort it out seems to have gone."

David Glover, from York-based law firm Aaron and Partners, says VOSA's annual busi ness reports stress the need for better quality enforcement, rather than simply quantity.

VOSA is looking for better quality enforcement, but in reality it would appear that it just wants the numbers to tally up. So examiners obviously are being set targets."

VOSA measures how it is doing by a system called Performance Gain. Introduced in 2001, this is a complex method of point scoring designed to ensure examiners target enforcement activities more effectively, rather than just stopping trucks for the sake of it.

It says the system is intended to focus on the effectiveness of what it does, rather than the number of tasks it performs.

Performance Gain is based on the idea that enforcement falls into three main categories deterring offences by staging roadside checks, educating operators on rules and regulations, and penalising those who fail to comply.

Each outcome is given a value related to its estimated contribution to road safety and environmental standards.

"The points value ranges from one point for a sift check [a walk-round check] of a vehicle to 100 points for an immediate prohibition with a safety-critical defect on steering, tyres or brakes," says VOSA in a document explaining how PG works.

So for an enforcement that meets the definition of a deterrent, VOSA scores between one and 10 points. For anything educational, the score can go up by 10 to 50 points. The biggest rewards come with sanctions imposed on those who flout the law, which can earn anything between 50 and 100 points.

So, in its first year of operation, 2001/2002, VOSA amassed 7,623,630 points in total.

Each year it revises its overall target and also sets goals for what percentage of total points should be provided by educational activities, spot checks, weighing and vetting of dangerous goods.

"Perhaps the most significant development is the encouragement that Performance Gain has given to VOSA to develop its education and advisory roles," says the agency. But does the system simply put pressure on examiners to accrue as many points as possible? A VOSA spokeswoman denies this and insists that targets are not simply cranked up year after year.

-Performance so far this year [2004-05] suggest that we will achieve about the same numbers of points as last year [2003-04], about 9,300,000. This will actually be about seven or 8% above this year's objective."

Isolated point-scoring

In other words, the total points target for 2004/ 2005 has been set below the level actually achieved the previous year.

"Objectives are not set on previous year's performance," the spokeswoman says. "This is to ensure there is no pressure on staff to achieve objectives through inappropriate means."

VOSA has support from the Freight Transport Association, which insists that while isolated examples of pointscoring may occur, it's not the policy of senior management.

"It's certainly not the management view,says Gavin Scott, VOSA's manager of operator licensing. "They're doing an awful lot of work on targeting operators who they know are likely to be flouting the rules.

"The whole idea of Performance Gain is that it concentrates efforts on areas where they're likely to get the best results.

"I would be extremely disappointed, and I'm sure VOSA would too, if anybody was saying to vehicle examiners or traffic examiners they had to stop a certain number of vehicles, or get a certain number of points." •


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