Technicality plea cost £47
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• Records offences, which were described as technicalities by the defence, led to a Yorkshire haulage firm and one of its drivers being fined a total of £47 by the Huddersfield magistrates on May 2.
Davis (Dyers) Ltd, Holmfirth, was charged with failing to maintain a register of drivers' records books, failing to complete the front sheet of a driver's record book, failing to complete a record sheet before handing it to a driver and failing to correctly display an identity disc. The driver, T. E. Rudd, of Hillhouse, faced three charges of failing to deliver a driver's record to his employer. Both defendants pleaded guilty.
Mr Peter Wright, a DoE traffic examiner, said he stopped a vehicle being driven by Rudd in Bradford Road, Huddersfield, on October 29 1971. Rudd produced his driver's record books and Mr Wright noticed that the driver's name and address and the operator's 0 licence number had been omitted from the front cover. In addition there were a number of records still in the book that were over seven days old and had not been handed in. Rudd said he had forgotten to complete the entries in the book and to hand in the records referred to.
When he visited the company's premises, the examiner found that the last entry in the driver's records book register had been made in October 1970. It was admitted that a number of books had been issued since that date.
In mitigation it was said that the company operated only two vehicles. The man in charge of the transport, a Mr Dawson, was moved to an associated company in Lancashire for some time last year and it was during this period that the offences arose. The difficulty had been that no one else had been sure of the correct procedures. The spirit of the regulations had not been transgressed, no excessive hours had been worked and the offences were in the nature of technicalities.
The magistrates fined the company £10 on each charge except the one in respect of the identity disc, for which they imposed a fine of £2 and Rudd was fined £5 on each charge.