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WHY DRIVERS DAILY INSPECTIONS ARE SO CRUCIAL ?
Often treated as a "tick box" formality, the drivers daily inspection is one of the cornerstones of road safety and legal compliance. It is the difference between a good operator and the bad operator, the difference between road safety and road dangers and can mean the difference between life and death.
The drivers daily inspection is the last line of defence so far as safety is concerned, before a vehicle goes out onto the road. Transport operations where the system of daily inspections is ineffective can find themselves facing serious legal problems.
Imagine your vehicle has been involved in a road traffic accident. No matter whose fault it is and whether or not the condition of your vehicle was a contributing factor, a police or VOSA investigation is inevitable.
How do you know if your vehicle was roadworthy? How can you prove it to the authorities when they inevitably look your records? How can you show that you had an effective safety and maintenance system? How would your daily inspection records help you in the event that you faced the possibility of a corporate manslaughter charge?
Your drivers daily inspection sheets will be crucial evidence in these situations. Not only must the sheet to be filled in correctly though, underlying that must be a very thorough check by all drivers each day for the vehicle goes on to the road.
What often happens is that drivers and operators see the daily defect reporting system as simply a tick box exercise. If the form has been properly filled in, there's nothing to worry about. This approach is even more serious than failing as not filling in the records in the first place. An ineffective daily inspection system is a risk to road safety, whether or not the records have been properly filled in.
As an operator, you need to be awake to the fact that responsibility for drivers daily inspections comes down to you. That responsibility is not discharged simply by showing that your drivers have filled in the sheet and ticked the boxes.
By way of example, an operator attending a traffic commissioner public inquiry to face allegations about its maintenance systems, may be able to demonstrate records which on the face of it show that daily inspections are being properly undertaken.
The daily inspection records may have all the right boxes ticked, have all the details fill out and the drivers have signed and dated them. However, on closer examination, the six weekly safety inspection sheets show that there is a constant theme of defects been rectified which ought to have been identified at the time of daily inspections. For example, six weekly inspection sheets may show that such defects as split tyres, cracked mirrors and blown bulbs are being repaired during the six weekly inspection stage. In addition to this there may be vehicle prohibition notices (PG9s) for the same type of defects which should have been rectified before the vehicle went on the road.
Notwithstanding that the daily drivers forms have been filled in, these are exactly the type of defects which would be picked up by drivers during an effective daily inspection. The fact that they weren't being rectified before the six weekly inspection stage, regardless as to whether the forms been filled in correctly or not, means that the daily inspection system is flawed. The operator will then have to face the consequences of that.
The lesson to all operators is therefore that a proactive approach should be taken to make sure that not only are the drivers filling in their forms correctly but also to make sure that behind the paperwork, real rigorous inspections are being carried out by drivers each day.
It is a common feature of the industry that drivers often treat the daily inspection as a semi-serious formality rather than a serious, rigorous legal requirement. The driver CPC will hopefully go some way to redress this.
An Article Produced in July 2011
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