Be Careful out there

UK PROFESSIONAL DRIVERS FORUMS THE UK PROFESSIONAL DRIVERS FORUM (INTERACTIVE)
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The DfT have launched a new consultation, OK, it was last month but you can still respond to it up to 11th August 2014.

You can read all the exciting stuff here;

The basics are that DfT want to bring ‘historical’ drivers hours offences into the fixed penalty scheme.

As things currently stand, when your driver card is downloaded at the roadside, or your charts are examined are friends at DVSA may issue a FPN for any offences that they are able to issue a Prohibition Notice for. A Prohibition can only be issued for on-going offences eg. you drive continuously for 5 hours 20 minutes and are still driving in that period when you get pulled into a checksite. As the offence is ‘current’ a Prohibition and also a FPN may be issued. Now you drove for 5:20 this morning but then took a 45 minute break. The offence is now viewed as ‘historic,’ a Prohibition cannot be issued and hence no FPN. The matter could still be dealt with by summons to Court and is how a UK driver would be dealt with. For a driver living outside the UK the summons to Court is a whole deal more difficult and usually doesn’t happen. Not quite a ‘level playing field.’

I’ve heard reports about some Police forces currently going back up to 6 months on a driver card and issuing FPNs for offences found. This may be because the enabling legislation gives a procedural difference between Police and DVSA Examiners. In my view, if true, the action would also be an abuse of process as the officer is enforcing the law unfairly against users of digital Tachos as they have the records to go back 6 months, where a driver with an analogue Tacho will not have the same number of charts with them.

Apologies forgot to say that the consultation suggests a 28 day limit for roadside inspection, bringing enforcement on drivers with digital cards into line with those that use analogue charts.

So what do fellow Trucknet users feel? A good thing or the spawn of Satan?

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Just relating to analogue records, tacho discs have to be retained by the vehicle operator so they could check these if they chose to. That has always been the case, they would carry out silent checks and then check the records later and prosecute the driver, operator or both if offences came to light.

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£20 for a ‘Lost’ card or £100 fine…hmmmmmmm

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If it in the last 28 days then that would be fine but as we all know some officers would push it

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Thanks for bringing attention to this, gb. As we know, the whole point of the EU drivers’ hours rules is to arbitrarily (but still usually generously IMO) prevent excessive driving, mainly for safety reasons. Thus, if one had driven for say 10.5 hours on a day 3 weeks ago I would hope that one would not now, if ever, still be affected by that “excessive” amount of driving. Obviously the printout explaining the reason for exceeding the prescribed hours (which I hope would have been done) should be kept for a while. After that amount of time I imagine it would still be possible for the authorities to try to disprove the driver’s word, though a driver who knows he’s in the right would, I hope, challenge any attempt at issuing a penalty at the roadside. Overall, I am quite surprised one could not already be issued with an FPN for an “historical offence”, but I think such an “offence” is different to one being currently perpetrated as it would surely be more difficult to prove.