Legal Brief
RTD received as well as can be expected
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The RHA was dismayed at the Department of Transport's (DfT) announcement of the two week delay in implementing the Road Transport (Working Time) Regulations now set for 4th April. "Were the last three years not long enough for the Department to prepare the Guidance and Regulations on time?" said RHA Head of Employment Ruth Pott.
"As we have said before, these regulations represent the biggest single change to operating practices that this industry has seen. Three years ago when the Directive was agreed, the RHA actively urged Government to publish its Regulations and Guidance as early as possible to give industry time to adapt. Sadly, Government has failed to achieve this."
The FTA has welcomed the publication of the new working time rules for commercial vehicle drivers and crew with FTA Policy Director James Hookham saying, "Government has listened to and been persuaded by the strong arguments FTA presented and, overall, has provided significant flexibility in its regulations and guidance which should assist industry in reducing the impact of the Road Transport Directive."
Though no one in the haulage industry actually welcomes the RTD, both organisations are broadly content with the way it's being implemented, though some minor concerns still remain.
The final say on how exactly the RTD rules are to be interpreted will probably come from the courts when the first prosecutions come for breaching the new regulations. Given that some employees working time will be averaged over a 17 week reference period it will most likely be the Autumn before VOSA can pursue the first miscreants and bring a test case.
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Whilst these may be a minor inconvienience to a prosocuting officer with time on thier hands (run time error 6 , NTDVM.exe unstable etc, basically it keeps crashing [2.6ghz 500meg ram winXP] ), to a chart analyst as myself, expected to analyse over three hundred tachograph charts charts a DAY as a matter of routine. This new offering is far from user friendly or accurate for that matter. Preliminary testing with optical scanners it has failed to to detect small movements of the vehicle, blips of "drive" less than one minute appear to be ignored by the software yet with a manual "forensic" reading of the chart these are rounded up to a full minute for analysis/prosocution purposes. Of course it's early days (lol) give a few days we'll have the scanners calibrated , and the final version has yet to be released..but right now, the view from the analysts desk , implementaion of the WTD on april 4th 2005 is being a tad optomistic.
In fact it's so unworkable ,smart cards will come as a blessed relief, no driver hire agency has approached my firm to check thier charts..ever. Employers have to take it on good faith that the hire driver working days is legal, and not working a night shift or a saturday an sunday some place else.