Revocation appeal lost
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Newton Stewart haulier William Jolly has lost his appeal to the Transport Tribunal against the revocation of his licence and his disqualification from holding an 0-licence for three years.
Jolly traded as BJ Transport, with a licence for 10 vehicles and 10 trailers. In March he was called before Scottish Traffic Commissioner Michael Betts at a Dumfries disciplinary inquiry following a string of speed limiter offences.
These included a serious crash on the M6 in August 2000 in which one of his vehicles overturned. Police investigations later revealed that the truck was travelling at 69mph just before the accident and a wire was found in the cab similar to those used to disable tachographs and speed limiters.
In October last year traffic examiners found two more vehicles with limiters that were not working properly, and in December another of Jolly's vehicles was followed by police at speeds in excess of 65mph. The driver of that truck subse
quently admitted that he had removed the speed limiter fuse.
Jolly had previously appeared before the TC in June 2000 following a series of convictions, including one for falsifying a tachograph record. In addition, one of his vehicles had been found to have a speed limiter on which the calibration switches had been altered. The TC had suspended one of Jolly's specified vehicles for two weeks and emphasised that Jolly's repute was on a knife edge.
Appearing before the Transport Tribunal Jolly maintained that he knew nothing about the illegal tampering with the speed limiters and tachographs and blamed his drivers for the offences.
He argued that the TC had been wrong to find that he was responsible for the illegal switch found last October. He said that if he had known about the switch he could easily have told the TC
that the offending vehicle was abroad and then removed it.
Dismissing Jolly's appeal, the Tribunal said that the TC had been entitled to come to the conclusions that he did.
It concluded: in particular, on the evidence it was clear that the appellant did fail to prevent the development of a culture in which, at minimum, a blind eye to non-adherence to the rules was the norm.
"In the light of the earlier warning we think that the Commissioner had no alternative but to revoke the appellant's licence and to disqualify him."