Exclusively question

Hi All,
Have a bit of a poser here, we operate a small fleet of mostly 4.5tonne vans on an island and have been quite happily driving without using tachos or log books because of the “island” rule and not driving more than 4 hours on any day ie “domestic rules”. Well Mr Plod stopped one of the vans recently and discovered that a couple of times in the past year unbeknown to me the vehicle had left the island for a few hours and had been driven on the mainland .

OK I hold my hands up we couldn’t claim the vehicle had been used “exclusively” on the island so he now says we have to drive on ec rules everyday although the vehicle is only driven for about 2 hours.

Accepting this as the situation, he tells us that the vehicle can now NEVER revert to the previous method while in our ownership.

My question is if we were to buy a 3.5tonne vehicle for the very occaisonal mainland trips and undertook never to take the larger vehicles again is there any way we could regain the exclusive use clause, or is it lost forever

Grateful for your views on this

Tosh

I don’t know the definitive answer but with any law I suspect that it’s like Virginity, once you’ve lost it your [zb]'ed

I’d argue the opposite.

On a couple of occassions I’ve taken a 17 seater minibus over to Calais. Shopping trip.

Being an International journey, tacho charts were required to be used.

This does not mean that charts are required for the rest of the life of the vehicle.

Looking at the GV262 list of exemptions the wording is

Drivers are also exempt…when engaged in the following transport operations…

And I read that as a daily consideration. If the vehicle is going to leave the Island on that day, then a chart is required. If not, it isn’t.

In practical terms, most vehicles will venture onto the mainland at some stage as not all communities will be of sufficient size to provide specialist repair and servicing facilities.

Speak to VOSA and let us know what they say.