School bus service stripped of passenger licence by Transport Agency
Friday, 14 December 2018
A central North Island school has lost its passenger service licence as the NZ Transport Agency takes a tougher line on safety and begins naming errant operators.
The Te Wharekura o Te Rau Aroha board of trustees is among five operators to have goods and passenger service licences revoked, and the Waitoa school is working with the Ministry of Education to find suitable transport for the 45 students who will use the bus next year.
The agency has taken 106 compliance actions since announcing a major change of direction in enforcement in mid October and at the time it undertook to identify people or organisations if there was a potential risk to public safety.
Te Wharekura o Te Rau Aroha head teacher Hinematua Gillett said the school owned the bus which had maintenance issues.
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The Ministry of Education said a team regularly visited all contracted transport providers to inspect buses, maintenance records, driver licensing, training and safety standards.
The Waitoa school was among schools funded to provide transport, and the ministry would help the kura to find a suitably licensed provider, or provide services directly.
Burch Hill Transport of Blenheim, Daniel Bryan of Morrinsville, Hawke's Bay Seafoods, and SHT Holdings and Relocate Homes NZ of Havelock North have all had their goods service licences revoked.
Relocate Homes director Shannon Tawhiti has previously been prosecuted for dumping relocated houses in Hastings without resource consent and in 2016 he made headlines for buying an Auckland house for $1, shifting it to Hatings and putting it on the market for more than $200,000.
The agency said it has also revoked the licence of a transport course provider, but had withheld the name pending further actions.
All up it has proposed revoking 54 licences, given 18 warnings, and suspended 28 people or organisations running transport services or doing vehicle inspections.
So far almost 22,000 vehicles have been recalled for warrant of fitness (WOF) rechecks, but only 1365 have been reinspected, and so far 298 of them have failed.
Since the agency launched a recent review of its compliance work, more than 20 WOF providers have been suspended, a big increase on the single suspension last year.
The most recent suspension was of Auckland-based vehicle inspector Stephen Upson and business Sunnybrae Auto Services.
The agency said Upson had allowed two unauthorised people to carry out WOFs on his behalf, and he also failed to correctly identify issues with a vehicle's brakes, exhaust and steering.
Sunnybrae had some vehicle testing equipment which was either overdue for maintenance or broken, and 747 vehicles were being recalled for new WOFs.
Both the Motor Trade Association (MTA) and the Automobile Association said the use of unauthorised inspectors was a major concern and the review of the transport agency should consider making it compulsory for qualified inspectors to display photo identification.
MTA repair sector specialist Graeme Swan said the 3600 WOF sites around the country had to display an inspection certificate for the organisation and for each inspector.
But there were no photographs attached to the latter, so there was no way customers could check the person testing their car was qualified.
The Transport agency website has a database of heavy vehicle certifiers and Swan said it might be time to add a public database of WOF inspectors.
Swan said it was pleasing to see suspensions of the 'rogue element' doing sub standard work but he did not believe the use of unauthorised inspectors was widespread.
He said it had previously been a long process to suspend inspectors and he was glad the agency's 'inform, education and deter' approach had changed.
'They would often educate people four or five times before they tried to deter them.'