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Missing Skyliner tachos

4th August 1988, Page 18
4th August 1988
Page 18
Page 18, 4th August 1988 — Missing Skyliner tachos
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• Coach operator Skyliner International was fined £10,200 last week at Ashton-underLyne Magistrates for allowing hours and records offences to take place and for losing tachograph records.

The company admitted 66 offences of failing to ensure drivers returned tachograph records within 21 days, 16 offences of permitting drivers to fail to make entries on the centre field of tachograph charts, one offence of permitting a driver to fail to use his tachograph correctly and seven offences of permitting drivers to exceed the hours limits and take insufficient rest. It was fined 2100 per offence and ordered to pay 21,200 prosecution costs.

Christopher Worthy, prosecuting for the North Western Traffic Area, said that an enormous number of the company's tachograph records had been missing. Though they might have seemed technical offences, they were not because there had been no way of detecting whether or not offences had been committed by drivers when records were missing. If information was missing from the centre fields of charts it had been very difficult for a traffic examiner to put the charts in sequence. When interviewed, director John Schofield had said that they had verbally warned drivers, but the calibre of the driv. ers had been so poor and wonl so driver-intensive, that they could not be too hard for risk of losing all their drivers. The) had been unable to check the records as often as they would have liked, owing to pressure of work.

Schofield told the magistrates that the company had been taking holidaymakers to the South of France and Spain. Agency drivers had been used to take the coaches on from the changeover point in France and they had had difficulty in getting charts back. In addition, last year a lot of the drivers they had previously employed had gone over to local service operation following bus deregulation and, as a result, there had been a shortage of drivers and the calibre of the drivers they had employed had not been as good as it had been in the past.

The company was now employing a more professional agency in France. Each chart issued to drivers was listed so the company now knew if charts had not been returned and which driver was responsible, and a better calibre of driver was now being employes:


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