A spanish trucker who was watching t.v. whilst driving down the M1forcing a fellow trucker to swerve onto the hard shoulder after being overtaken and cutting in close by the said trucker was charged with dangerous driving at Leicester Crown Court…he was subsequently banned from driving in the U.K. for 1 year…
3 months previously he had been fined £3000 for having 4 asylum seekers in his trailer on entering the u.k…forgive me for being wrong …if i am…but i thought that the british drivers found with asylum seekers in their vehicles were fined £2000 for each one…so he should have been fined £8000…or do foreigners get special treatment…in this case i think he did…
have a nice day
If this was guy found bringing asylum seekers into the UK,… why on earth was he allowed back in? Surely since he’s spanish, it should be grounds to remove him from the UK■■? Something there doesn’t seem quite right.
Did this guy (or his company) actually pay the fine? I was under the impression that foreign drivers seldomly got fined because they knew full well there was next to no chance of ever getting the money plus isn’t it illegal under EU law or something like that? The sheer amount of times my dad has found them in his trailer in France and Belgium. Once they even boarded his trailer whilst on the ferry from Zeebrugge to Hull but as my dad is German there’s little they can do to him.
Its the simlar case with the parking tarrifs at services, I’ve lost count of the times where the parking attendant has walked over to an Eastern European truck and asked for the money only to be met by “speakie no Englishie” and got away with not paying, how often does that happen to you guys?
As for the illegal immigrant issue, I think its a downright disgrace that drivers are even fined at all, you’re guilty no matter what you do. Its a pitty that the fools incharge who make up these idiotic laws dont spend a few months in Calais with truckers, not the usual token 30 minute publicity visit, but actually live the life of the real world. Perhaps send them into a truck and when they find immigrants in their trailer, fine them!
I would assume that as an employed driver his company paid the fine, the point is why was he fined £3000 for 4 illegals when the british are fined £2000 per immigrant…no matter how many checks you have to go through at the ports prior to embarkation…the immigrants manage somehow to get on the ferry and then enter the trailers…this government has not addressed the issue of illegal immigration…and let the truck driver do it for them…in todays paper it was stated that 1000 asylum seekers arrive at heathrow every day…with this fact…why are the pilots not fined…■■? and there are more checks at airports before departure…problem is the immigrants destroy their passports before they land…look at this mentality…it said in yesterdays paper that refused asylum seekers will be made to do community service to help pay for their keep…why ■■? surely if you are a refused asylum seeker…you should be kicked out…full stop…
have a nice day
Truckyboy,
Its a crazy situation and a very dangerous one for drivers who get caught out. Once they even found a Polish lad in my dads trailer with 3 Sri Lankans, his excuse was that he didn’t have enough money for the ferry, dispite having a legit entry visa to Britain, not even an illegal immigrant and little did he know that drivers can take passengers free on the Dover-Calais routes anyway! He should simply have asked one of his many countrymen parked up there to take him across. I dont know why this Spaniard was fined a different rate but I dont think they even fine foreign trucks anymore do they or not sucessfully anyway? didn’t a bunch of German and others bring a case to the European courts and win it? My memory of it all is a little hazy now so I may only be imagening it.
robin hood…the whole asylum situation is crazy…but i guess it costs too much money to police it anyway…hence £2000 fine for drivers…were doing the governments dirty work as usual…and in their eyes we are second rate citizens anyway…the french help them on their way anyhow…what happened to sangatte…we offered to take all the asylum seekers from there on condition the french close it…but the a.s. are still queing up to get here…great help that was eh !!.. i cant understand why we obey the rules of asylum seekers and the human rights act when most other e.u. members have a total disregard for it, whose the mugs ■■..be a good job if we pull out…we havnt got a decent friend amongst them…oh well…rambling on again…see ya
have a nice day
bob you aint wrong. eu my arse! just us that follow the rules… they can stick it. no problem with genuine persecuted people coming here willing to work, its the rabble coming for the benefit system that get my goat. whats wrong with the other 8 or 9 countries enroute? bloody pc britain again
What really wound me up was when someone, I cant remember who, said that these “asylum seekers” should be trained (free of charge) to become truck drivers because they entered the country in such fashion. Whats that all about then? Filling in the job left behind by the bankrupt driver who lost everything when they entered the said drivers trailer? Talk about insulting, not to mention the fact that most on this board and me next year will have to pay full whack for all training we want.
Kate Hasler:
If this was guy found bringing asylum seekers into the UK,… why on earth was he allowed back in? Surely since he’s spanish, it should be grounds to remove him from the UK■■? Something there doesn’t seem quite right.
As the UK is so PC these days, being a foreigner and getting caught breaking UK law, is not grounds to be banned from the UK. Besides which, he is an EU citizen, the UK is nominally EU and he can’t be banned from the EU.
the fines are now variable I think, one of our drivers picked up a vehicle from Calais last week with 4 bodies hiding in the back and was fined £2600. Not a happy man!!
As I was touring about our loverly country this week, I heard that a Welsh bus company has managed to get a recruiter out to Nepal. They have started a lot of ex-Gurkas, to drive their buses. I assume that they are offering very poor pay rates so can’t get UK bus drivers interested. Does anyone have any other info on this?
I forgot to look there 
I am sure that only a year or two ago I read a story about the Gurkha’s applying for jobs driving our trucks, but the home office refused to grant them work permits…I wonder what has changed?
Driver shortage maybe jimti?
Coffeeholic:
Driver shortage maybe jimti?
there was one when they were refused work permits as well 
the fine system for illegals found represents responsibility of the company or driver.
so if the driver carried out checks and had a tir cord in place but the company did not supply the driver with a check list then the company will have the biggest share fo the fine.
if the company supplied the driver with a checksheet and the driver ignored it then the driver faces the biggest share of the fine and most probably in that case the entire fine.
the fine is £4,000 per person now but is worded as up to and is entirely dependant on blame and who has not done enough to secure the vehicle from intruders.