Taxi Driver Online

There’s a new Taxi inspector in town. Ex cop, of course. He has decided, in his infinite wisdom, to require registered garages who carry out vehicle mot/ taxi ph tests to produce a written report on work carried out on vehicles that have failed tests. So if a brake test results in a failure the mechanic has to write an essay on exactly what work was carried out. Brake test fail? Worn brake pads? Brake pads replaced? Pass? Not good enough. Some of the best mechanics I dealt with over the years could barely string a sentence together, let alone write an articulate composition.

Boy, am I glad to be out of it.

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Former taxi driver

Do the garages charge for producing these reports and who pays?

If they don't, they'll probably start.

The one I still use is thinking of giving up taxi /ph testing due to the red tape.

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Former taxi driver

Or they will be ex testing garages.

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IDFIMH

We have a new enforcement officer as well. Quite a nice chap (in case he’s lurking around here somewhere ) decided he was going to check our vehicles thoroughly on a race day at the station. He was even in the back of the cabs checking that all the seatbelts worked. It wasn’t until he checked the fifth cab that a driver asked if he was going to check any of the drivers belts or wasn’t he bothered about our safety?

do any of you wear your belts ?

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lack of modern legislation is the iceberg sinking the titanic of the transport sector

Probably only about a third! I always do, especially after watching the video of that Liverpool cabbie that went head on into that lunatic in the Mersey tunnel a few years ago, were the passenger and driver of the other car both died.

I'd guess Jimbo's initial post is related to this in the new best practice guidance, issued less than a year ago:

Not sure if this is a new thing, or was in the guidance previously, but I'd guess it wasn't.


It's in section 8.19 headed 'Vehicle testing'

https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... -licensing


Monitoring diligence

Licensing authorities should, where possible, obtain details of the test, including failures. Where testing arrangements do not make the sharing of this information possible, the licensing authority should use GOV.UK to check the MOT record of a vehicle to ascertain if any vehicle defects were identified during an MOT. Where licensing authorities designate where a vehicle must be inspected, and the outcome is not recorded on the MOT database, the authority should require the tester to provide them with the outcome of the test.

It is expected that diligent monitoring and maintenance of the vehicle condition by proprietors should result in few if any dangerous or minor defects being detected at on-road compliance checks. A vehicle proprietor should ensure that a vehicle is in a safe and satisfactory condition, frequent failures can be raised with the proprietor and authorities can consider whether they are content that the proprietor is taking sufficient action to monitor and maintain the safety of their vehicles.

Of course, if councils do in-house testing then the likes of the above likely to be less relevant to 'monitoring diligence', I'd guess.

But that kind of thing, together with the stuff about daily walkround inspections, is probably consistent with the kind of remote Wolverhampton approach to licensing and inspections. So rather than directly inspecting vehicles, the onus is more on drivers and proprietors, and a less direct approach to inspections by using the MoT system instead, and requiring reports from affiliated MoT garages, and/or doing it remotely via the MoT database

Of course, unless there's some sort of affiliation between the council and an MoT garage, they're not going to be able to request written reports.

So presumably Wolverhampton will be checking 30,000 cars via the MoT database?

They've not other way of 'monitoring diligence' if they're not directly inspecting cars in any way