Transport Manager scams

In a worrying recent case in the West Midlands, Traffic Commissioner Nick Denton revoked the licence of CCS Waste Ltd.

The Traffic Commissioner found that the company was essentially acting as a front for the disqualified operator Jones Waste Services Ltd, with a similar disregard for safe and legal operating practices.

The commissioner disqualified CCS Waste Ltd’s previous transport manager, Christopher Staples, indefinitely, after he had found that Mr Staples had “failed to exercise continuous and effective management to the extent that he did not realise that operations had commenced. When he did, he brazenly offered himself as a flag of convenience transport manager, a name on the licence to give the outward (but false) impression that a transport manager was in charge.”

The commissioner criticised as particularly “damning” an email exchange between Shaun McCarron and Christopher Staples in which Mr Staples said that he charged “£500 per month for my name to be on [the licence].”

Denton also heard that Staples’ successor as transport manager, Lori Wheeldon, had in effect been prevented by the operator from taking up her responsibilities, although she should have tried harder to do so. This was of particular concern because he had made it quite clear in his decision on Jones Waste Services Ltd that if Shaun McCarron was involved with any future application he must engage the services of a competent transport manager. Mr McCarron had in effect ignored this stipulation by the device of “employing” two successive transport managers who were given absolutely no responsibilities in the business and who were virtually never physically present. Mr. Denton concluded: “He clearly treated the post of transport manager as an inconvenience which I (and the law) had imposed upon the company and which was not to be taken seriously. The result was, unsurprisingly, a simple continuation of all the shortcomings of the previous, revoked, Jones Waste licence.”

The commissioner disqualified both CCS Waste Ltd and Shaun McCarron from holding an operator’s licence for three years.

Further details:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/decision-for-ccs-waste-ltd/decision-for-ccs-waste-ltd