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Bryan gets twice the stick from IC
Page 8
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II by Mike Jewell
The directors of Devon operator Bryan Haulage saw their appeal against disqualification blow up in their face when a new Traffic Commissioner doubled their sentence.
The Okehampton-based firm has now had Its Operators' licence revoked for the second time, and the company and its four directors have been disqualified from holding an 0-licence for 12 months instead of the original six.
Last December Western TC Philip Brown revoked the company's licence for 45 vehicles and 50 trailers and disqualified the directors following a series of hours and tachograph offences (CM 15-19 Dec 20011. They appealed to the Transport Tribunal, which quashed the revocation and disqualification orders and directed that the case be reconsidered by a different IC (CM July 11-1T), When the proceedings reconvened before North Eastern TO Tom Macartney he said that the tachograph charts for 1997 and 1998 indl cated that "drivers were tipping and loading off the card" and the company should have known this and stopped It quickly. However, problems continued from September 1997 until December 2000. Macartney accepted that remedial measures were eventually put in place, but he noted that they were not fully effective until well after December 2000.
The nature of the offences was almost all to do with missing mileage, he added. Bryan argued that this was a minor Issue Involving tiny distances. However the fact was that drivers were deliberately removing charts from the tachograph head in order to conceal their activities.
Macartney said that ultimately it was an operator's responsibility to ensure the safe management of transport in a professional Industry. The offences involved drivers concealing their true activities, so the extent of danger to the general public could not be determined.
He described the continuing failure of the company to ensure that the drivers' hours and tachograph regulations were observed as "a serious lapse".
Making the disqualification orders, Macartney said that the greatest blame had been laid at the feet of operations director Keith Hotchkiss. However, as all the directors had been closely involved in the company, they were equally responsible.
The IC concluded that if the company and its directors had failed to carry out remedial measures, or If other aspects of the operation had not had such a good history, he would have disqualified the company and its directors for two years.