I SAW A TRAFFIC COPPER

says...

It's the foreigners and the locations you mention simply confirm this. Keep well clear of Romanian and Turkish rigs. THere's pooloads of them coming into Dover running over hours, with dangerous vehicles and dodgy licences. VOSA are having a field day.

End of road for foreign lorry drivers who flout safety rules

By Ben Webster, Transport Correspondent

THOUSANDS of foreign lorries are to be pulled over for checks in a year-long campaign after government inspectors found that they were three times as likely as British trucks to be breaking safety rules.

More than 100 inspectors will focus on channel ports and motorways, carrying out random checks as well as targeting known rogue operators.

With diesel a third cheaper on average on the Continent and low-cost drivers from Eastern Europe, the number of foreign lorries on British roads has risen to record levels.

Three quarters of all lorries crossing the channel last year were foreign registered. A decade ago, half were British. On a typical day, there are 12,000 foreign trucks and 95,000 British ones on the country?s roads. A quarter of the foreign lorry drivers checked in the year to the end of March had exceeded the maximum number of hours permitted between breaks, according to the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (Vosa), the government agency which inspects trucks.

By contrast, only 8 per cent of British drivers were found to be over the hours limit.

Fatigue is one of the main causes of crashes and can have devastating consequences if the driver affected is at the wheel of a 44-tonne articulated lorry.

Romanian drivers were the worst offenders, with more than 40 per cent driving for too long. Turkish and Irish drivers also had high offending rates.

Romanian trucks were also twice as likely as British lorries to have safety defects.

Overall, 43 per cent of foreign lorries had mechanical problems with their trailer units, compared with 30 per cent of British lorries.

Dell Evans, the Vosa manager leading the campaign against dangerous foreign trucks, said that the figures concealed the fact that defects on British lorries were more likely to be minor. Foreign lorries tended to have serious problems, such as faulty brakes and bald tyres.

Vosa plans to make a five-fold increase in the number of checks on foreign lorries, to 22,500 over the next year. It is recruiting 30 more inspectors and buttigning 80 existing inspectors to the campaign.

The scale of the problem was seen last week when The Times spent a morning at a Vosa test centre off the M25 in Surrey. In less than two hours, inspectors placed prohibition notices on a dozen foreign lorries.

The brakes on the trailer of a Polish lorry were faulty and had been disconnected, leaving only the brakes on the cab unit. If the driver had needed to brake sharply, the trailer would have jack-knifed.

a badly worn steering joint and an Italian driver was found to have been driving for 17 hours without a break.

Mr Evans said: ?The problem is that a large number of European countries carry out few, if any, roadside mechanical inspections. We have a particular problem with lorries from southern Ireland, Poland and some smaller Eastern European countries.?

He said that offending rates were only likely to fall significantly when inspectors had the power to impose on-the-spot fines on foreign lorry drivers and clamp those who refused to pay. These powers are contained in the Road Safety Bill, which is due to come into force next year.

At present, Vosa can only order a driver who has exceeded his hours to wait for up to 24 hours in a layby.

?Some foreign operators build that into their operating costs and tell their drivers just to keep going, regardless of how tired they are.

?Drivers are often relieved to be pulled over by us because they get a well-earned rest.?

person FATIGUE

# A couple in their twenties were end last month when a Polish lorry hit their car on the M11. The driver was charged with causing rest by dangerous driving and faking an entry on a sheet recording his driving hours

# A German lorry driver was jailed for five years in 2002 for killing two adults and two children after driving with little rest for 42 hours

# A South African driver last year asked police in Wales to stop him because he was falling asleep at the wheel but feared being sacked if he chose to stop himself

-- Conor

"I have as much authority as the pope, I just don't have as many people who believe it" - George Carlin