Legal Representation at Public Inquiry

The recent decision of Gillbard Plant highlights some useful points to operators and the importance of effective legal representation.

At the start of the hearing, the Traffic Commissioner asked the operator why “there was no investment in legal representation”.

This was the operator’s second Public Inquiry in two years and one can infer from the TC’s comments that he would expect a prudent operator to have legal representation.

Being legally represented informs the TC that:

  1. Firstly, you care about the outcome of the hearing and are willing to spend your hard-earned money to achieve the best outcomes possible.
  2. Secondly, assuming the advisor is suitably experienced, you have received good advice on how to be compliant.

Put those two aspects together (willingness and knowledge), then it should provide the TC with some reassurance that compliance will be met in the future.

What legal representation would also have done is to ensure that, at the very least, the evidence the TC had requested was presented to him on time and in order.

This operator had relied upon its Transport Manager to upload the records. He had failed to do so and failed to bring hard copies of everything with him.

What else does this case remind operators about?  

It reminds operators of the importance of basic maintenance systems, including:

  1. Laden roller brake tests (which should be taking place at every PMI)
  2. Interrogate the RBT printout (for things such as insufficient load or large imbalances)
  3. Analyse your PMI sheets – for instance, driver-detectable faults should not be found regularly on PMI sheets.
  4. Driver defect reporting should be regularly audited with ‘gate checks’
  5. Wheel nuts should be torqued and then retorqued after a tyre is replaced

This was a case of an operator being let down by a Transport Manager. However, an operator must manage and supervise their Transport Manager.

They cannot simply engage the services of a Transport Manager and assume they can delegate all responsibility to them.

This operator was perhaps dealt with leniently and perhaps could have received more criticism for not monitoring their Transport Manager.

To this end, operators should really have documented monthly compliance meetings so they can evidence the directors’ involvement with compliance.

As with everything in operator licence compliance:

  1. Have an appropriate system in place
  2. Audit and check the system
  3. Make sure you can prove all of that with written evidence.

Read the full case summary here.

If you require representation at Public Inquiry, don’t hesitate to contact Jared Dunbar.