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Available driving hours cut by Euro Court order
Page 7
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• by Mike Jewell The number of driving hours available to European hauliers has been drastically reduced by a European court ruling.
With immediate effect, all drivers who travel to collect a vehicle from a place other than their employer's operating centre must now record that time as working, the European Court of Justice has ruled.
It has also been decided that the time spent driving any vehicle, including tippers working off-road, should be recorded as working time if the driver intends to subsequently drive that or another vehicle when it is covered by the tachograph regulations fie when a tipper rejoins the public highway).
The court had been asked to decide if and when drivers have to record other work on their tachograph charts as part of a case involving Nottingham coach company, Skills Motor Coaches.
Skills had argued that drivers and their employers were not under any obligation to record time spent by drivers travelling from home to take over a vehicle.
But the court ruled that drivers must record all periods of work, including time spent travelling to take over a vehicle which is not at the driver's home or his employer's operating centre. This was regardless of whether the employer gave the worker instructions on how to travel to that vehicle.
The European Court pointed out that the aims of the existing regulations were to harmonise conditions of competition; to improve working con
ditions for drivers; and to improve road safety.
The regulations sought to ensure that driving times and rest periods alternated, so professional drivers did not remain behind the wheel long enough to cause fatigue and jeopardise road safety.
The court decided that time spent by a driver travelling to a vehicle subject to the tachograph regulations was liable to affect his state of fatigue and thus his driving. For this reason such time must be regarded as forming part of "all other periods of work".
The ruling will have a huge impact on hauliers sending drivers in cars to meet vehicles whose drivers have run out of hours, and on tippermen who have not previously had to record time spent driving in quarries.