• COMMENT CREDIBILITY GAP • It has been another bad
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week for the Department of Transport's credibility. In our May Legal Bulletin, published with CM last week, we threw what light we could find on the baffling recent EEC Commission report on enforcement of EEC drivers' hours and tachograph regulations. This reveals that, compared with our Community partners, our own DTp is either extremely inept at catching and prosecuting offenders or even less capable at making statistical returns.
The report's statistics for 1983 (no more up-to-date figures have been published) show that West Germany reported more than 33,000 daily driving limit offences in that year while, astonishingly, the UK reported none at all. Similarly incredible discrepancies are also disclosed in the report between the UK and other member states on all kinds of other breaches of the drivers' hours and tachograph regulations.
Even more worrying than the obvious inconsistency between these figures and the annual total of fines imposed in the UK — not to mention the number of court cases regularly reported in CM's news page — is that this appears to be yet another example of the DTp being much less than candid. People are becoming too accustomed to statements from Marsham Street which most kindly can be described as difficult to believe.
Speaking at Tipcon last week Reg Dawson highlighted a classic recent example from the Secretary of State himself. Nicholas Ridley has told the European Transport Committee that if Britain were forced to accept 40-tonners -all the lorries would do is to fall through the bridges into the rivers."
Nonsense of that kind from a senior minister must leave open-mouthed all those European engineers who have done so much work already on establishing a scientific method for accurately determining the effect of various axle weights and designs of suspension on road wear and damage. It must also be ringing in the ears of the EEC engineers who are preparing to come and inspect some of our apparently so suspect bridges.
When the Secretary of State loses respect, so to an extent does his whole Department. While in the short term that may give some operators a feeling of satisfaction or amusement, ultimately it benefits nobody involved in road transport.
It is high time some serious efforts were made to close what has become not so much a credibility gap, as a chasm.