Haulier slams Yorks Post
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• Worksop, Notts-based agricultural haulier F William Ellis' managing director Bill Ellis has spoken out against what he says is an attack on hauliers "to create a good headline" on the pages of regional daily The Yorkshire Post.
Ellis says the 83,000-circulation newspaper's 15 October story headed "Faulty lorries fuel Britain's death toll" inaccurately interprets figures from the Vehicle Inspectorate.
The article says: "One in four lorry accidents is caused by maintenance faults, according to records kept by the Government's own inspectors but never before revealed." Ellis says this claim is based on a statistic in the article that out of 4,092 crashes investigated by the VI, 983 were caused at least partly by vehicle condition.
He says this conclusion is a "distortion of the figures" because the VI is usually only called in to examine vehicles where maintenance is in question. "The national safety lorry record is good, at 51 accidents per 100 million vehicle kilometres in 1992 compared to 94 accidents involving cars," says Ellis.
II The Yorkshire Post article is part of its on-going Danger on our Roads campaign for safer lorries.