Roadside tacho checks by the Highways Agency officials and police indicate that Continental truck drivers are more likely to break EU working time rules on UK roads than UK citizens.
The latest EU figures confirm this: they show that 27,418 of hours offenders detected on British highways in 2004-5 were UK citizens, while 11,565 were from other EU states. But the situation is reversed on the Continent, where locals are more prone to break the hours rules.
For example, in Italy 90,725
Italian truck drivers were found to be breaking the hours rules compared with just 2,834 offenders from other member states. In Germany 631,226 German offenders were found, compared with 73,246 non-Germans.
Offenders caught in their own countries also massively outnumbered visiting or immigrant EU drivers in Denmark, Finland, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Only in Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg and Sweden were foreign EU nationals found to be as commonly associated with working time offences as in Britain.
The European Commission warns that hours offences are a growing problem. Taking the EU as a whole 1.185 million hours offenders were detected in 2003-4, compared with 1.183 million in 2001-2.
Reed Business Information Limited.©2009
