Road accident prevention: Roadside checks target foreign truck drivers taking safety shortcuts

Foreign lorries are to be the target of an extensive campaign of checks 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 pulling over known rogue operators.

There has been a growth in the number of continental drivers on British roads for economic reasons. Diesel is a third cheaper on the Continent and low cost drivers from Eastern Europe gives hauliers in the extended European Union an economic advantage.

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 assigning 80 existing inspectors to the campaign. The scale of the problem was seen last week 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 Bulgarian lorry had a six-inch gash in a tyre; a Slovakian lorry had 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.”

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