tachograph:
You say you’ve been told you only have to log hours after the weekly rest period, you’ve been told wrong, you should manually record any none driving work days in the same week (Monday to Sunday) as you drive to EU regulations.
I tried to derive the legally required minimum records from the EU Regulations governing drivers’ hours and tachographs in one of my posts earlier in the thread.
The key question for an occasional driver is when you come into scope of EU hours regulations and when you go out of scope. For the sake of simplicity, I’m assuming that the driver is not doing any LGV or PCV driving on domestic hours or AETR rules - those drivers should be keeping continuous records anyway.
You must take a weekly rest period - a full one of 45 hours plus or a reduced one of 24 hours minimum in the week (00:00 Monday to 24:00 Sunday) that you start to drive on EU regulations. To my reading of the regulations (see that previous post), your records only need to start from the end of that weekly rest period, but it seems nonsensical not to log the start of that rest period so there is no argument about how long it lasted.
On a weekly rest basis that is clearly all the records you need - you need to keep records until the end of the weekly rest period after you last drove on EU regulations or when you compensated for any reduced weekly rest, whichever is the later.
There’s a daily driving limit and a weekly driving limit, but they only apply to driving, not to other work.
As such, I see no need for records from before the initial weekly rest period from an EU drivers’ hours rules point of view. Would you agree that far?
However, records from the beginning of the week (00:00 Monday) are needed to demonstrate compliance with the Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations (SI 2005/639), which implements the EU Directive on the same subject.
Occasional drivers should therefore make tachograph records (manual entry on a digital tachograph, written on the back of a digital printout or written on the back of an analogue chart) before they start to drive to EU regulations from the earlier of:* the beginning of the weekly rest period before they drive, or
* 00:00 Monday
After a driver drives to EU regulations, they should keep manual records (manual entry on a digital tachograph, written on the back of a digital printout or written on the back of an analogue chart) until the latest of:* the end of the weekly rest period after they drive
* the end of the rest period where they compensate for the last of any reduced weekly rest periods, or
* 24:00 Sunday
Does anyone want to disagree?
Edit: one typo corrected
Edit 2: emboldened the important conclusions