Redhead Freight wins its appeal on tacho case
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• Bradford-based Redhead Freight has successfully appealed to the Divisional Court against its conviction on two offences of causing drivers not to use tachographs in accordance with the regulations. Last September the company was fined a total of £400, after being convicted of these offences by the Bradford magistrates.
Allowing the appeal, Lord Justice Woolfe said that there was no dispute that the-company had known, or at least had deliberately shut its eyes through its transport manager, to the fact that one of its drivers was not filling in the tachograph records except on isolated occasions.
Nonetheless the very fact that on one occasion the driver did not conunit the offence, showed it was not a situation where the inevitable consequence of sending out that driver was that the tachograph charts would not be filled out.
Though there was acquiescence in the record keeping which could amount to permission, it fell short of a positive mandate to the driver to commit the offence, or any other sufficient act for the company to be said to be guilty of causing them.