A haulage company described by a Deputy Traffic Commissioner as having "significant shortcomings" in its arrangements for examining and analysing tachograph records has come "within a whisker" of losing its O-licence.
Timmins Waste Services, based in Wolverhampton, had its licence curtailed with immediate effect from seven vehicles to five with one trailer, and suspended for seven days from August 28, in a written decision issued by West Midlands DTC Lester Maddrell, following a public inquiry.
The inquiry was called after a driver employed by the company - Kristian Wilding - was stopped in August 2009 by a VOSA examiner.
The examiner found that the driver's tachograph records for the previous four weeks were not complete, and that nobody at the company had checked them since he started at the firm three months earlier.
A subsequent visit by a VOSA inspector to the TWS premises found that the procedure for dealing with tachograph charts was for them to just be filed and left alone.
A representative of the company told the official that this was because no-one had been trained to use the tacho scanner the company had recently purchased.
Maddrell ruled that former company transport manager Keith Lippitt had lost his repute, while the repute of his replacement Neal Timmins - a director of the company - was tarnished.
The DTC added: "I have come within a whisker of revoking this licence and disqualifying the company and its directors.
"It was evident that no checking had been done on Mr Wilding's charts since he started work.
"Indeed the company was not even able to establish what days he had worked and whether he had been supervised by anyone, or, if he had, by whom."
TWS says since the beginning of this year, it has sent charts on a weekly basis to a firm of tachograph analysis consultants.
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