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LOWDOWN ON THE TIPPER PIRATES

SOME nine months ago at our subarea meeting of the Road Haulage Association, it was brought to my attention by certain individuals that piracy in the tipper field was being conducted by various organizations.

Now I can name these organizations. But, of course, one can't prove anything and there are libel laws. You have certain organizations who are basically people who take contracts, but who own no vehicles and subcontract to these pirates by stopping 6d. or is. per yard on each job they do and paying these drivers weekly.

It is quite a legitimate procedure but I, and a lot of other legitimate transport contractors, call these people parasites who live off someone else.

Under normal given circumstances no one has got anything against agents who take this work and then farm it out. No one has any, shall we say, feeling against anyone doing this—as long as the monetary gain by the person who is actually doing the work is sufficient for him to live on. And, of course, this isn't the case.

Piracy, in my honest opinion, starts by this medium and through motorway contracts and jobs that are so badly priced than no other legitimate contractor would touch them.

The first point is this: I buy a lorry, costing 12,400, to run on the road. We have 17 licences, so if you multiply £2,000 alone, even allowing for the fact that you get a discount, £34,000 is the figure that one would pay for transport at the cheapest possible way of buying new vehicles.

Now to maintain 17 vehicles you have to have two full-time fitters. You have to have premises_ On 17 vehicles you have also your tax per year which is something like £154, I should think; and your insurance—£160 per vehicle. Your A. B or C licence is not such a terrible price—

about £5 for a three-year period so this is really negligible.

But these pirates are operating with old bangers that they can buy from a breaker's yard for £300 or £200.

And they can earn between £150 and £200 a week quite comfortably by fly-tipping. With one vehicle.

What a fly-tipper does is this: He buys a lorry which is calibrated at 8 cu. yd. He then gets a couple of scaffie planks and puts them round the side and gets two more yards on the top. The basic point is that the vehicle is inefficient in the first place and should never be on the road. Invariably it has the pre-hydrovac braking system which wouldn't pull you up empty, let alone with a full load. Yet the fly-tipper is running at approximately 2 ton over permitted axle weight—which no legitimate contractor would ever do.

But say the price is 6s. a yd. If you are getting 2 yd. over official calibration, that's 16s. And if you are doing 7 or 8 loads a day, multiplying those 2 yd. gives a considerable amount of money. No legitimate contractor could afford to ill-treat his vehicles in this way: the nuts and bolts man would soon get him for having a lorry in a bad condition, and the weights and measures would have him for overloading.

The pirates have false number plates and there is not much anyone can do about it because they have false letters on their person purporting that they are "Joe Bloggs". So when the police pick them up they just produce them. The tax— oh that is in the post or something. Can I see your certificate of insurance and driving licence?— Oh well, I haven't got them with me. I don't carry them with me. Will you produce them within five days?—Yes.

Well that is the last that is heard of them. The following morning the cab is a different colour and has another set of number plates.

Now I know this is quite a system but let's face it, people seem to treat these pirates as if they are b— idiots. Far from it, In actual fact it has been stressed to me by very reputable transport contractors that the only way to make money in the transport business today is actually to run illegally because you stand no risk, you haven't got to worry about maintaining your vehicles and you can earn money without any commitments whatsoever. You can even run on red diesel at Is. 3d. a gallon instead of the normal 5s.-and-something a gallon—this is not unusual for these pirates.

I am not going to say for one moment that everyone who buys a lorry and who goes on motorway work is working like this, but I would say that 50 per cent of them do. That is a hell of a lot of pirates.

A good part of the problem derives from the situation when there is a lot of work around and people can't get sufficient lorries to take their muck and are punting around from one to the other. And Joe will tell Bill, and Bill will send Harry until all the fly-by-nights who haven't thought of licences are in,

HARDCORE OF PIRATES IN LONDON

Now there is a hardcore of pirates in London. I would say in the region of about 200 to 300 who have been doing it for ages and getting away with it successfully. And they run in little bands of four or five, and any newcomer normally finds himself affiliated to one or the other groups of pirates.

I could tell you instances of where they put their own chap in a white coat and a peak cap to direct lorries to a vacant site with everyone thinking he is a council employee.

They break off the locks on gates and put their own locks on. They park one of their own cars in front of the gates so no one else can get in. They drive up in threes and fours, move the car away, unlock the door, back the lorries in, tip up, come up, lock the door. Everyone thinks it is quite legitimate because they are locking the door with a key.

It is not unusual for a contractor excavating a certain piece of ground to come to work one morning and find that half a dozen loads of earth have been tipped on his newly excavated ground. They wait until dark and their last loads then go on this piece of excavated ground.

APATHY OF GENERAL PUBLIC

I feel that a lot of this is due to apathy on the general public's part as well because very few people want to take numbers and report it.

Of course the problem one comes up against is the snag of getting and verifying the correct particulars of any driver or lorry owner. And there is quite an underground bush telegraph. I don't suppose the Licensing Authority has a chance of catching any more than 10 or 15 per cent.

It is very difficult to name any names for one very good reason. Because they only deal with those people who employ them. Now the people who actually employ them are, in the main, legitimate. They will go to a sub-contractor and take the contract. They then ring around to get somebody else to do something who gets somebody else. And this is the sort of procedure, with pirates coming in a regular pattern from subsub-contractors.

You only find the pirates on a job where the tips are scarce. You don't find pirates on a job in close proximity to a legitimate tip, in the main. They can't compete in the near vicinity of a tip. The pirates operate in the City, West End and heavily congested areas. Now North London is becoming quite bad at the present moment because most of the tipping facilities that did exist in the north of London are closed.

You don't find this kind of problem on the outskirts of London or Barking, Dagenham, because there are tips in Rainham and all round Essex so there is no basic problem. And you don't find it more westward—you wouldn't find it in places like Hammersmith, Shepherd's Bush or Richmond because of the vicinity of the tips towards Sunbury and places like that.

We were in Camden Hill doing a job for Queen Elizabeth's College and we tame one morning and there were five heaps of muck spread along the road—it is a dead end—a cul-de-sac.

I could take you now to a place at Hendon where I have never seen such a diabolical mess in my life. I went there with John Silbermann, the chairman of Hallett Silberrnann, the big transport contractors. He wanted me to look at this job and I have never seen anything so diabolical in my life.

He was asking me to give him a price and I would say that he would be lucky—even with me cutting the price as low as possible—to get away with less than about 050-£800 to move this fly-tipping.

CARS, CONCRETE AND OLD METAL

It isn't a question of rate; it's a question purely and solely of cars, concrete, old metal and everything having been tippped there. It's a stretch of road no more than twice the width of this room but I would say there is nearly 2,000 cu. yd. of material piled there.

I will give you an example, in which I objected most strongly to the LA—in vain I must unfortunately say. Three people were given contracts to take away so many thousands of yards of sewage sludge from a site near London. The people who got the contract went in at 00,000 below the next legitimate contractor and were given the job by the relevant county council.

Now these three people who took the contract did not have one B licence between them and had never done any work of this kind before in their lives. They had two old bangers that were falling to pieces. No garaging facilities, no servicing facilities and yet they were given the job by the LC C.

I was told that they are doing the job quite satisfactorily but I tried to complain about the pricing—that it was an impossibility for them to do it. They could not afford to do this if they used transport that was properly maintained, properly looked after and properly serviced.

But as I said, they did the contract and I believe they took six months longer than stipulated, though of course any legitimate contractor would have had a penalty placed on him. We could have possibly done the job ourselves if we had been allowed six months longer than the actual tendering time. This is where you get differences of opinion between certain elements of local government. Between the refuse side and their contracting side.

You see the contracting side don't realize that they are possibly letting contracts at a price which is going to cost the refuse side a damn sight more money in the long run.

The contracting side is going to employ the flytippers to do the work at a reduced price but in actual fact I would go as far as to say 30 per cent of the muck that is excavated in the Metropolitan area—I would even go as far as to say 40 per cent —never leaves the boundaries. It just goes from one site to another. So if these local councils take a job and give it to the pirates, it is quite possible that the same local council will pay five times to have that same cu. yd. of muck shifted.

INTERPRETATION OF THE ACT

Each LA's interpretation of the Act as far as the carriage of goods is concerned is as he sees it. But I think you will find that the LA in the Greater London area—the Metropolitan and South Eastern area—is of the opinion that if the predominance of the work involves carting away so many hundreds of thousands of Cu. yd. of muck, then definitely they require an A or B licence to carry that muck. It can't be done on a C licence.

If this is the case, and a licence for hire or reward is required, then in my honest opinion there must be steps that the Government can take. This is nothing at all to do with the Licensing Authority—he can only implement the law as you well know. But the thing is that the law should be altered.

We are of the opinion that one way to stop the pirates operating is to make the main contractors responsible for muck shifted from their sites, irrespective of how much they like to lay down the fact that it is the responsibility of the sub-contractor. This we feel can be done.

Also they should be responsible for the overloading of vehicles which results in weights and measures people being involved. At present a contractor can overload your vehicle and have no responsibility in this matter at all.

When we decided that this had gone far enough, it was decided that an enforcement officer would be supplied and certain transport contractors showed great enthusiasm for this, and we have done a lot of spadework. We wanted to make sure that the responsibility for the loading of this muck on pirates was placed at the source, which is the main contractor.

The contractors who were mainly concerned with this enforcement scheme and doing something concrete against trying to stop the pirates, against what a lot of people do consider to be fairly heavy odds are:—Myself and my colleague Mr. Southgate who are involved with my own licences which are under L. R. House; plus W. Oakley Aggregates Ltd. and S. and S. Tippers; Mr. Frank May, of Saunders Transport, of Woolwich; Mr. Charles Brain, of J. C. Brain; George Batten; Mr. David Poultney, of Poultney's; Mr. Drawry, of Pitts; Mr. Oswald Lewis, of Cheamside Haulage; Mr. Genet, of Genets; Mr. Nichols, of Truckel; Mr. Cyril Crate, of P. Crate and George Neal; Mr. Gordon Pannell, of Pannells, who is also chairman of the RHA Metropolitan tipper functional group and who has given a lot of support in this matter; Mr. Roger Dwyer, of George Cross; Mr. Harper, of Hall and Ham River; Mr. Palmer, of St. Albans Sand and Ballast and their group of companies; Mr. Gabriel, of Gabriel; Victor Ward, of Ferris; Mr. Flack, of' St. Mary's Contractors; Mr. Penfold, of W. H. Penfold of Lewisham; and one or two other people who have shown interest although not in the same way as these aforementioned.

This is in the offing. As you must appreciate there is a lot of spadework to be done before the formulation of this. The first thing is a list and it is now being compiled of all known fly-tippers, and will eventually be distributed to all people who require them so that the necessary procedure of trying to verify whether this is a legitimate lorry or not can be partially done away with by having this list in operation amongst the various transport contractors.

A measure of support has to come obviously from the majority of main contractors. We have approached them on various occasions and told them that it is quite possible for them to get a list of legitimate haulage contractors from the RHA. But this doesn't seem to have carried a great deal of importance with the main contractors and basically they only seem to be interested in getting the muck shifted at the cheapest possible price. Whether it is going from one plot of council ground to another seems to me to strike them as being completely immaterial.

RUNNING WITH THE HARE AND THE HOUNDS Even the Ministry of Transport is, in my honest opinion, running with the hare and the hounds. They are allowing vehicles to be used on motorway contracts, and all big Governmentoperated schemes, which are not roadworthy. No steps seem to be taken to rectify this. And one can only conclude that a blind eye does get occasionally turned when a contract has to be done at a certain price.

I can only assume, as I said previously, that a blind eye is being turned because although one reads in all trade journals of the number of legitimate contractors who have had certain GV9s issued and warnings from the LA, the warnings that seem to be given to these fly-by-nights are few and far between and although allowing for the difficulty in possibly tracing or getting hold of a certain number of these jokers, it doesn't sort of bear out with the number of them that are around operating like this that a certain number of them don't get into court and publicized.

These death traps must be eliminated because they are giving the tipper industry a very bad name.

I think more could be done with putting notices on waste ground stating anyone tipping there is obviously tipping illegally—would people take note of numbers and report them.

But even leaving this all aside, something which is to my mind very serious—and I have pursued this problem as far as this because of this—is that a vast number of these vehicles are uninsured and one well knows the fantastic amount of trouble that could be caused by having a vehicle involved in an accident, possibly resulting in death of individuals, when no insurance cover is held on that specific vehicle.

This is something that I feel that is widely broadcast yet is increasing not only because of the premiums that are involved but the companies as a whole dislike immensely taking an ownerdriver on to their books even if he has a new lorry and he is perfectly legitimate.

It is difficult to get insurance cover because the insurance companies are quite well aware of the type of individual that invariably has a oneman band on insurance. The insurance companies have obviously done a lot of investigating in this because of the amount of claims that they have had, particularly of lost vehicles and vehicles being stolen.

Of course it is very easy, when you have a vehicle to cut it up, burn it up, sell the saleable parts of it and then report it to the insurance company as being stolen. In some cases, of course, again engines, back axles, etc., are changed and these stolen lorries are used under false numberplates as well.

It is very difficult to turn round and point at any one thing that could be stopped just like that. One can only start at source. The negotiations now have been made official with the RHA and we are pursuing in an official capacity now with Mr. Harris of the RHA, secretary of the Metropolitan area, We are arranging meetings between GLC. Metropolitan Police and the Licensing Authority to see if we cannot get some kind of coherent co-operation between all of us to combat this piracy. I think we are going to be successful because everyone has shown interest in what we are trying to do.

But in the end, the only way that this is going to stop is for transport contractors who own tipper vehicles to co-operate among themselves in groups by passing necessary information, by work sharing, by making sure that they are able to compete on certain classes of work with these chaps to stop the temporary B licences.

This can stop one side of it. The motorway work obviously is a different problem. One can only hope that the Minister of Transport will finally wake up to the fact that she can't have her cake and eat it. She can't let contracts at an uneconomical price to get the motorways cheaper and expect one set of the community to run completely and apparently without any fear of being dragged into the official circle. Legitimate contractors must have a legitimate price to do this work.

There must be co-ordination between the main contractors of motorways and the transport contractors so that no contractor can put 100 vehicles on motorway work and then have those 100 vehicles standing idle for four days because of rain and bad access roads.

Some time type of clause must be entered into that these vehicles will have a rate of compensation to, at least, cover the driver's wages and the overheads that these vehicles must entail by being on constant stand-by for a specific Government contract.

We have been threatened. In the last two weeks we have had two of our lorries damaged. It's quite obvious that it has been done deliberately. The back lights have been smashed with a bar of some description and the bulbs taken out. I have had threatening telephone calls. I have also had threats that I would be beaten up. This obviously could happen. But in the cases where I have been threatened it's been with people that I do know— people that it is easy to pinpoint. And under those circumstances they have not carried out this threat.