Warning on overloads
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• The managing director of an Oldbury haulage company has been warned that he must avoid any future overloading convictions or lose the company's licence.
The warning came when West Midland Traffic Commissioner John Mervyn Pugh adjourned consideration of what action to take against the licence held by R Gayden & Sons at a Birmingham public inquiry.
For the company, which runs 17 vehicles, Michael Carless maintained the convictions were not running at a significant level, there having been five convictions in the past five years. He said the problem was that the company carried a lot of groupage traffic and problems with axle weights did occur with groupage. He also pointed that the company had been given absolute discharges on two of the last three occasions.
Carless said that in the year 1994/5 the company had carried 3,684 loads and made 10,632 deliveries.
Conceding that there was a prosecution pending, managing director Brett Gayden said the company had its own weighbridge but it appeared that it was no longer accurate and it would cost a lot of money to replace. When the vehicle was checked on their own weighbridge the weights matched those declared, yet when the vehicle was stopped it was 80014 over of its maximum permitted weight, although none of the axles was overloaded. Some vehicles had as many as 20 deliveries to make, said Gayden, and even a new weighbridge would not solve the problem of axle overloads when part of the load was delivered down the road.
Carless argued that there was an irreducible minimum of convictions with an operation of this size and type, but Mervyn Pugh pointed out the law was such that if there were continuing convictions for the same type of offence, the licence was likely to be revoked.
Adjourning the proceedings, Mervyn Pugh said he wanted to see in a few months' time what the company had done about its weighbridge and equipping its vehicles with hydraulic pallet trucks to enable drivers to adjust their loads to prevent overloads.
"You are going to have to spend some money," he told Gayden.