I come to you this month with a cautionary tale about the importance of dotting your ‘i’s’ and crossing your ‘t’s’ when it comes to the Heavy Vehicle Work Diary.
There is currently a sting going on in Sydney where police are pulling over drivers for compliance checks, going over their logbooks with a fine-tooth comb and charging separate offences for every instance of non-compliance with the work diary rules.
What this is looking like is poor drivers who haven’t realised they’ve been making small administrative mistakes, copping 60 or so charges. They’re then looking down the barrel of maximum penalties up in the hundreds of thousands of dollars plus tens of thousands in court levies, for making
the same mistake on every page.
Now, we agree that the most important thing here is safety, and that the work diary rules need to be followed because they help keep everyone safe. But it is our view that this approach of throwing the book at drivers for small admin errors runs contrary to the goals of the NHVR and the HVNL, which are for enforcement agencies to work together with industry to educate rather than punish where possible. But the police unit conducting the sting doesn’t share our views, at least for now.
The kinds of mistakes we’re seeing repeated and leading to charges are:
- Not filling in all the details at the top of each work diary page, like the vehicle rego number, hours scheme and time zone.
- Not factoring the time taken to do the daily check (top right hand corner of a work diary page) into the start time for a day’s work on the table below.
- Not giving the yellow copy of each page to the record keeper.
So my advice is that if you haven’t done a health check on your work diary recently, it could save you a lot of time and trouble if you take a look at it now and make sure you’re doing everything “by the book”.
You might consider doing a short course on the fatigue rules to keep your knowledge up to date, especially if you’re working alone. These courses are often run online and put you in touch with a convenor, who you can ask specific questions about your personal work routines, to make sure you’re doing it right. The NHVR is also a great resource for teaching drivers about the nuances of the work diary rules and it has a helpline you can call.
If you need advice about any part of the heavy vehicle work diary, or find yourself charged with breaching the rules, we at Ainsley Law would be happy to help.
Subscribe to the weekly Owner//Driver newsletter here.