Sand Fisher:
Does anybody know why there is a conflict between definition of a week for driving purposes and the RTD/WTD version?
The issue for me was ‘a week’. Now the weekly restriction is 60 hours but that is based on the fixed week which I presume is Mon 00:00 to Sun 23:59. However as we all know you can have a different week which could in theory be a period of 6 daily work periods say Wed to Mon.
Now even though you comply with the 60 hours in your Wed to Mon week you can fall foul of RTD/WTD if the previous working week on the Monday together with what you did Wed to Sun exceeded 60 hours. That is bonkers, compounded in this case by a client saying don’t use POA even though one was sat in a canteen for large amounts of time awaiting something to do. From Wed to Sun, the Sun being the last day of work in this instance a total of 50h 56m was worked, the Tue being a reduced weekly rest day, however Tachomaster wants to include the Monday of the previous week so takes the total up to 60h 57m.
I am just curious to know how the hell is one supposed to work within that system when you don’t when you turn up how much ‘delay’ one might encounter even though the driving. tipping, messing about time could be reasonably guessed at.
The use of the fixed week is basically a compromise to prevent the 60 hour a week limit being reset early but without using a more complex (and even more restrictive) 7-day rolling calculation.
Conceivably, there can be up to 14.25 hours work each day. The fixed week prevents you doing 4 of those starting Monday, taking a single day off as weekly rest on Friday, and then doing another two of them (for a total of 85.5 hours work in a fixed week).
Also, if you try to back-to-back the fixed weeks (so that conceivably you could do 85.5 hours in a rolling 7 days, if it straddles the weekend), you can’t do the exact same pattern the following week, so it still stops employers getting into any sort of 4-on-1-off-4-on-2-off rhythm of using drivers in that manner.
If you don’t know how much delay you might encounter, the law says you should build in a larger margin of error to account for a poorly organised customer who is unpredictable in their delays, and therefore plan to work fewer hours than the maximum if things go smoothly.
Also, the advice you’ve had on POA seems correct. If you’re sat in a canteen waiting for further instructions at any moment (rather than just sitting out a known period of delay), then that is working time not POA.