Motors Feature: compromised testing: Self-testing by owners and operators means some commercial vehicles are being declared roadworthy despite dangerous defects. David Labanyireports.
It is not clear if Gay Byrne was referring to the shambolic testing of commercial vehicles when he said the Road Safety Authority (RSA) would have to counter "25 years of neglect".
If he wasn't, Byrne's was a remarkably prescient observation. Last week a report detailed a frightening level of laxness, inconsistencies and almost non-existent enforcement in the roadworthiness testing of lorries and trucks. This situation has been in place since 1982.
The report, carried out by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), was commissioned in the wake of a number of serious crashes involving lorries and buses.
It details systematic weaknesses that have resulted in de facto self-regulation by hauliers and drivers for vehicle standards and it shows how, despite warning signs and the fact that one in five of all deaths on the road involve a lorry or bus, the situation was unchanged for decades.
The central problem is that the owners and operators of lorries and buses can test these vehicles in their own workshops, many of which double as approved test centres.
According to the PwC report, this situation was particularly common among bus companies and warned that it was possible that "due to pressures of cost or inconvenience or time off-road, undue pressure is placed to pass certificates for vehicles that should have failed".
The proliferation of test centres - the Republic has 158, around twice what is required - means that many test centres double as dealerships.
Because the cost of a vehicle is significantly increased if sold with a valid roadworthiness certificate "this calls the integrity of the system into question", the report found.
This long-standing practice where owners or operators of commercial vehicles can test their own fleet also creates "considerable scope for unscrupulous or careless operators of test centres not to comply with the current requirements", according to PwC.
It was also alleged to PwC that some unscrupulous test centres will issue roadworthiness certs for vehicles without even inspecting them.
The problems with a "Chinese walls" approach such as this are as obvious for commercial vehicle testing, as in banking or law or any other sector.
In a sector where margins are tight and cost-pressures incessant, such a system creates obvious conflicts for fleet managers desperate to keep vehicles on the road.
This can lead to incomplete tests. Amazingly, PwC found that a vehicle could be passed roadworthy without the brakes being fully tested.
Responsibility for ensuring that test centres provide a consistent and reliable roadworthiness test falls to the 29 local authorities, but there are problems here too.
This function has been "given a relatively low priority by local authorities", according to the report and "testing standards are not applied uniformly throughout the country".
No evidence was found of sanctions being placed on authorised centres that had failed to maintain standards.
And anyone hoping that the deficiencies with the test centres and oversight is compensated by rigorous Garda or Department of Transport enforcement is going to be disappointed.
According to PwC, the Department of Transport, which had employed around six technical specialists to supervise this area, had only one left by 2006.
Garda enforcement of this area was also found to be almost non-existent. PwC said there was a "very limited level of enforcement, a situation acknowledged by gardaí" and adds that enforcement of the roadworthiness of vehicles "has not been given the priority it requires".
This is in part due to a lack of resources in the Garda, but also due to a lack of the required expertise and equipment. As a result there are "no specific statistics available" from Garda enforcement of commercial vehicle roadworthiness.
So, Ireland has a testing system for lorries and buses that is open to abuse, where the oversight mechanism are weak and where the Garda enforcement is so lax that even the extent of the problem is unclear.
One of the worst indictments of the current regime is that the Irish authorities were unaware of the extent of the problem until they started receiving roadside test data from their British colleagues, who were increasingly exasperated with the high number of unroadworthy Irish haulage vehicles traversing Britain.
Based on Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (Vosa) inspections, Irish-registered vehicles have a disproportionately high level of faults compared to those in the UK or from other EU states, with up to 60 per cent of Irish registered HGVs "mechanically deficient".
Disturbingly, according to Vosa, many of the vehicles stopped for mechanical infringements carried valid Irish road-worthiness certificates.
ANOTHER DISQUIETING ASPECTof this shambles is that haulage vehicles on transnational routes are typically among the best maintained and newest in the fleet, in anticipation of the more rigorous testing regimes encountered outside Ireland.
Since then, Vosa has been sending up to 500 files a month to the Department of Transport.
Despite the huge distances travelled and, in many cases, the huge size of commercial vehicles, the testing regime for 280,000 of the largest vehicles on the State's roads is almost the reverse of that faced by private motorists.
There is one single private testing operator - SGS Ireland - for the almost 2.2 million private cars, and while this test can be almost pedantic in its rigour it has none of the weakness of the dual test-centre and garage set-up for commercial vehicles.
More issues of concern are those vehicles not currently subject to commercial testing, such as refuse lorries, fire tenders, agricultural vehicles and, ironically, breakdown recovery vehicles.
Another problem is that only a small percentage of HGV trailers are tested.
The report makes 25 recommendations to improve the testing and enforcement regime and Minister for Transport Noel Dempsey has approved them all.
Implementation of the changes, which will see the RSA take over control of this area, cannot be allowed to stall.
It is to be hoped that talks on financing and restructuring the service proceed quickly and that the reforms coincide with determined and adequately resourced policing.
This area has been neglected for too long.
What happens when a fault is identified?
Between January and October 2007, the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA) in Britain reported 2,785 commercial vehicle defects in Irish registered HGVs to the Department of Transport. Over 40 per cent of these were serious defects that needed to be rectified on the spot. Of the defects, over six out of 10 related to trailers.
Although hauliers are legally obliged to test and licence trailers, the RSA is concerned that many of the trailers are not licenced.
Over the same period 289 drivers of HGVs were identified - primarily by Vosa - with tachograph offences. Every month Vosa sends through a file of faulty lorries and buses to the Department which passes it over to the RSA. Gardaí are notified of the faults and operators who are identified as being persistent offenders are subject to more frequent checking as required under the EU Directive.