A self-employed driver said to have committed drivers’ hours and tachograph offences while working for Ashton-under-Lyne based Mayfair Minibuses escaped with a formal warning, though Traffic Commissioner (TC) Simon Evans warned that such offences would normally have resulted in his PSV vocational driving entitlement being suspended.
Ian Whitehead had been called before the TC at a Golborne Public Inquiry. Consideration of action against the company’s PSV O-Licence was adjourned to a date to be fixed because of the illness of its solicitor.
The TC said that Mr Whitehead had been called before him in March 2017 following an investigation into the company by Traffic Examiner (TE) Christine Finnegan.
During the investigation she found Mr Whitehead had committed two offences of driving without a driver card inserted in his tachograph, one offence of exceeding the daily driving limit, and one of taking insufficient daily rest involving journeys to Gatwick Airport and Norwich City Football Club.
As the investigation was ongoing, the TC had thought it would be better to deal with Mr Whitehead at the same time as the company, not realising that it would take a year.
When asked whether he wanted an adjournment, Mr Whitehead said he wanted to get it over and done with.
In a written statement, TE Daniel Broome said that, when interviewed, Mr Whitehead had said that all his bus jobs were for Mayfair Minibuses. He invoiced BK Executive every Friday and they transferred money into his bank account. He drove cars for BK maybe every three or four days and drove minibuses for Mayfair on average once a week. His invoice to BK included his work for Mayfair. For the Gatwick and Norwich jobs, he received his instructions from Mayfair Director Pete Rosbottom.
TE Finnegan said that it appeared that on the Gatwick run, Mr Whitehead had exceeded the daily driving limit by one hour 34 minutes after his driver card was removed. Having looked at TE Broome’s statement she could not see where the daily rest offence arose.
Mr Whitehead said that after he finished the Gatwick job he had put the keys in the office. He denied “pulling the card”, saying that the one hour 34 minutes was nothing to do with him and the minibus must have been driven by someone else. He admitted to not inserting the card on the positioning journey for the Norwich run, but he did not understand why he did that and could give no explanation. He no longer did any work for Mayfair as this had been going on for so long and he had not used his PSV entitlement since this all came up.
Taking no action other than to issue the warning, the TC said that he took on board the fact that he had adjourned Mr Whitehead’s case in March 2017 for the common-sense reason that the whole picture could be looked at together.
Mr Whitehead in the meantime had in effect suspended himself.
