The Fors Community Partnership (FCP) has announced an immediate change to the way firms are allowed to progress through the Fors accreditation levels.
The move comes after it emerged that a vehicle operator was elevated from silver to gold status at the same time as its O-licence suspension was being confirmed for a series of drivers’ hours and tachograph offences.
In August, an appeal against the O-licence suspension imposed on north London construction haulier J O’Doherty Haulage in March was rejected by the Upper Tribunal. This was about the same time as the firm’s elevation to gold status was being approved.
The firm has since served its week-long suspension.
The FCP has now decided that applications for progression from bronze to silver or silver to gold will no longer be assessed or approved when Fors members are undergoing a legal appeal and told Motortransport.co.uk its terms and conditions were being rewritten to reflect this.
The FCP has not decided to extend the same restriction automatically to firms that have had action taken against their licence by a traffic commissioner but have chosen not to appeal the decision, however, or to those awaiting a public inquiry.
John Hix, regional director of lead Fors concessionaire Aecom, told Motortransport.co.uk the scheme’s terms and conditions allowed it to suspend or even terminate Fors membership after action was taken against a company at a PI but said that in terms of the revised Fors progression process “we will need to take each individual case on its own merits”.
The FCP declined to provide the reasons for this decision, however.
Meanwhile, a TfL spokesman confirmed that the last routine Fors audit carried out at J O’Doherty Haulage, undertaken by the FTA in May 2014 when TfL was still running Fors, showed up no areas of concerns relating to drivers’ hours and tachographs. This was despite a subsequent DVSA investigation that demonstrated a series of offences took place in 2013 and 2014.
Despite Hix describing Fors as “robust, transparent and beneficial to the industry”, Aecom and TfL have declined to provide a copy of the firm’s audit report or to comment in any real detail on it. The FTA declined to comment.
Hix has confirmed, however, that the Fors audit should include checks on an operator’s managerial systems for both drivers’ hours and working time rules, as well as checks on a proportion of the fleet to ensure compliance with these rules and checks on the firm’s record-keeping procedures.
