Kenny1975:
Don’t really see what your worried about if your Digi card is clean, your running legit, the vehicle is legal and the load is secure.End of the day its made out they are a law unto themselves but they ain’t really.
The main problem is we are talking tippers and when you are on site clearances you have zilch way on knowing what weight you are carrying on each trip. Last thing you want is to be driving for a company that is on the ‘watch list’ for other stuff. 
Fair enough if your worried about weights.
you say your oppo was a down to earth type of guy etc but think about it, why was he so full of tales of BIG fines , i still reckon he gave you the softly matey matey story to get you to quit- and you fell for it-who can blame you
there can be many reasons as to why he didnt want you on board, maybe hes running summat dodgey himself and your face wouldnt fit . iv seen this kind of matey matey chat over the years ,always summat behind it
corij:
you say your oppo was a down to earth type of guy etc but think about it, why was he so full of tales of BIG fines , i still reckon he gave you the softly matey matey story to get you to quit- and you fell for it-who can blame you
I’ve been driving for enough years to spot the ‘yard stirrer’ from a thousand paces. 
He wasn’t full of tales, never even mentioned fines till I asked why one of the other drivers was so jittery, keep phoning our cab asking about traffic etc. When most of your drivers are foreign nationals on agency, that get laid off with zero notice when it goes quiet, nobody has to worry for their job. Heck, I even knew one of the mechanics from years back when I returned to the yard and even he told me they were always getting hassles from DVSA.
With all the driving jobs out there now, none of us need to work for dodgy outfits anymore.
LIBERTY_GUY:
One of their drivers was fined over £2400 by DVSA, told me that himself, guy I was working with had already told me that painful fact though. Another one of their drivers had fines of over £900. Company had been busted too.Liberty Guy aint letting nobody have the opportunity to dip into his wallet to that extent.
Christ, even street robbers and violent criminals don’t get hit with fines like that.
Maximum fine from DVSA is £900. Anything over that is down to the courts. Sounds like someone is waffling 
Of course if he meant he had been prosecuted then fair enough a fine of that order is quite possible … but it’d be for some pretty serious wrong doings and plenty of them.
Guy with the big fines had been prosecuted. He reluctantly told me that himself. Multiple drivers hours offences over nearly six weeks. Going over drivers hours, insufficient breaks etc. Irrespective of what the driver did though, the company itself was fully aware of this fact, as the weekly digi card downloads the company demands, would have been flashing up all these infringements. A reputable company would have nipped it in the bud, rather than profiting from extra loads.
So the problems are mostly down to their drivers. Don’t believe everything your told and stop being so afraid of the dvsa. The amount if people are here worrying so much about being pulled over. The only reason I find it a pain is its wastes time in the day a little but they are not all modern day hitlers trying their best to hang you.
How has the company treated you? Those drivers you talk to if they thought it was so bad would have got a new job. Some drivers like to tell a good horror story and If they don’t work RDC’s I suppose they have to talk ■■■■ somewhere else.
mrginge:
So the problems are mostly down to their drivers. Don’t believe everything your told and stop being so afraid of the dvsa. The amount if people are here worrying so much about being pulled over. The only reason I find it a pain is its wastes time in the day a little but they are not all modern day hitlers trying their best to hang you.
I don’t know if you have ever worked tippers, but nowadays they give you a printed sheet of paper with how many loads you have to do on that job. With many hauliers they pay a load bonus which represents a good part of your salary and can be anything up to £100 week. That’s the primary reason why a minority of tipper drivers bomb around like absolute nutters.
The company in question was expecting two loads extra per day over all the other tippers on the contract, which were parked up and finished well before 4pm. The drivers with the firm I was running with were returning to the yard with literally minutes left on their driving time, which is cutting it too close with the evening rush hour. No load bonus, just the company with the push push attitude of keep chasing drivers on the cabphone and asking how many loads they had done. Just remember with tippers there is virtually no ‘other work’ and even on local work you are out of drivers hours for the first 45 minute break as early as 11.15 in the morning. Don’t do the number of loads for whatever reason and you have the inquisition when you get back, even if you have been pulled by DVSA it doesn’t cut it as a valid reason.
All this worrying. It sounds like a job trunking for one of the supermarkets is the best thing for you to do, because then at least you wouldn’t have to concern yourself with overloading/dodgy practices/whatever else.
The point re the bloke getting fined a couple of grand for drivers’ hours offences is a non-sequitur. Unless the boss rides round in the cab with a gun to his drivers’ heads and forces them to go over their time then there’s only one person to blame for the fine.
That said, if what you have been told is true regarding drivers caught and fined all over the place, the company ‘busted’, then it’s probably a good idea to give a wide berth - which begs the question why you want to know their OCRS score?
Olog Hai:
All this worrying. It sounds like a job trunking for one of the supermarkets is the best thing for you to do, because then at least you wouldn’t have to concern yourself with overloading/dodgy practices/whatever else.That said, if what you have been told is true regarding drivers caught and fined all over the place, the company ‘busted’, then it’s probably a good idea to give a wide berth - which begs the question why you want to know their OCRS score?
I don’t want to know their OCRS score 
What I was saying at the beginning of the thread was companies want to know everything about the driver these days, to the point of credit reference checks, CRB clearance, checking up on facebook, drink and alcohol screening etc. But is seems somewhat unfair that drivers cannot check on the company itself. There are lots of rogue hauliers still out there, so why can’t we check them out? Seems a reasonable request seeing we have a CPC card telling everyone we are professionals now. 
Well, you can’t, and that’s just how it is, rightly or wrongly. Round here the (shall we say) firms who don’t pay too much attention to the legal requirements of holding an operator’s licence are quite well known, which I imagine is the case in most places. One in particular is a national chain of shops which farms its transport out to a two-bit distribution outfit.
There are a couple of firms I know that VOSA permanently pulled the plug on and they lost their operators license. As VOSA got tougher a lot of hauliers had to update their fleets to much newer models, with the yard ‘nails’ ending up scrapped. There still a lot of rogue operators out there though still ‘ducking and diving’ and trying to talk their way out of everything.
I keep rigidly to the speed limits now (ideal driver for Tosco) as too many cameras lurking out there nowadays. If the place is closed then so be it. I do my walk around checks, but despite having being mechanically biased I don’t claim to be a truck mechanic so hope the vehicle has been maintained correctly. Don’t even mess with the electronic displays on modern trucks, as long as I can find the wipers and the lights, I am good to go. I make sure the load is secure and that’s as much as I can do to protect myself from the likes of the DVSA. Always have more breaks than required by law, as see far too many tired drivers crossing over the white lines still. Rest of it is up to the integrity of the company I am driving for. I don’t answer the phone if negotiating roundabouts or at junctions, If it aint hands free it don’t answered till I can pull up somewhere safe, they either like it or they don’t.
I don’t see why you would refuse to drive unless the vehicle was a shed then just VOR it? as long as your daily check sheet is with you stating which checks you have done cant see when hourly paid being pulled in for inspection would be an issue they obviously only flag the trucks not the driver.
war1974:
as long as your daily check sheet is with you stating which checks you have done cant see when hourly paid being pulled in for inspection would be an issue they obviously only flag the trucks not the driver.
As far as tippers are concerned I can answer that in one word - weight.
Not many tippers have on board weighers and if you doing site work on muck shift etc, you won’t be exiting off a weighbridge either. You may be overloaded (no way of truly knowing), or even be within your gross but overweight on one axle (again impossible to truly know). In either case the driver can get a hefty fine through no fault of their own.
In that situation would you welcome regular pulls by DVSA?
