News

The office manager and 12 drivers are given community service orders and fines. A Newcastle haulage boss has been jailed for 15 months after pleading guilty to tachograph fraud involving himself, another manager and the firm's drivers. Two drivers have also been jailed. Mark Howdon, director and transport manager of Throckley, Tyne & Wear-based MM Howdon, admitted the offences at Newcastle upon Tyne Crown Court. They included conspiring with the company's office manager Philip Appleby and  20 of the company's former drivers to falsify tachograph charts in June and July 2004.

In jailing Howdon and two of the drivers involved, Judge John Evans said no one should underrate the seriousness of such offences, which not only impinged on road safety but also the perpetrators' liberty. Immediate prison sentences were unavoidable, not least to illustrate that to others who ran their transport businesses in the same way. The drivers jailed were Michael Birkley of Felton for four months after pleading guilty to 36 offences of falsification and Garry Thwaites of Longtown for three months after pleading guilty to 30 such offences. Both Howdon and Appleby pleaded guilty to conspiracy and 20 drivers pleaded guilty to various numbers of offences of falsification. Appleby and 12 drivers were given community punishment orders of between 50 and 180 hours and four received fines totalling £2,650. All defendants not receiving prison sentences were each ordered to pay £500 costs.

Mark Laprell, prosecuting for Vosa, said the company had been principally engaged on timed deliveries with fresh produce. Howdon made all the management decisions and set each drivers work on a day-to-day basis. It was accepted that Appleby was effectively the messenger. The work habitually given to the drivers could not be done within the permitted hours limits. As a result the drivers falsified their tachograph charts, something that both Howdon and Appleby knew.

All the drivers had said they had handed their tachograph charts into the office. That was significant as a large proportion of the charts had not been retained when the office came to be searched. If Howdon was allocating work that could not be done within the hours limits, yet the charts looked legitimate, they must necessarily be false. The offences were committed during the first William Martin Oliver & Partners trial for conspiracy to falsify tacho charts. Howdon had said they "did not keep time sheets as that's how the Olivers were caught" ('Two Oliver bosses are jailed', CM 24 March 2005).

For Howdon, Richard Bloomfield said three customers had gone into liquidation owing the company £300,000. Howdon cut corners to try to keep the business afloat but failed. For the drivers it was said they had been put under intolerable pressure and had operated in a culture and regime of implied threats. The judge said that the two months over which the offences were committed was a "mere snapshot" of the company's trading. It was clear that a culture of deliberately ignoring the regulations had developed. Howdon had been party to the "deliberate and dishonest falsification of tachograph records on a grand scale". The judge concluded that he had engineered that to make a profit or cut his losses at the expense of the safety of the public and the drivers themselves.