Today’s transport industry is well-inhabited with various ‘gatekeeper’ organisations which are appointed (or self-appointed) to ensure compliance with legal and quasi-legal requirements, including FORS, CLOCS and Earned Recognition, through DVSA, for operators that go beyond the minimum measures required for legal operation by maintaining a very high standard in safety-related vehicle maintenance and drivers’ hours recording and compliance.
In a remarkable outbreak of good sense, coach industry voluntary body the Guild of British Coach Operators, is moving to align its engineering standards audit process with what is applied by DVSA for Earned Recognition in the passenger sector.
The Guild was established back in 1985 as a way in which a small number of highly professional coach operators could differentiate themselves from competitors in a market where cost often trumps quality in the eyes of consumers. Many coach hires and contracts are ‘won’ by the lowest bidder, and questions about quality and value for money (as opposed to price) are only raised by the hirer if something goes wrong, or passengers complain about the poor state of the vehicle.
Coach hirers choosing a Guild member company will know that a successful application for Guild membership requires a 100% pass rate on a rigorous quality standards check, and subsequent re-audits every two years. These standards cover everything from vehicle maintenance to customer care and staff development. The Guild’s membership is small, but there is a wide geographic spread and members are small and medium-sized family-owned fleets. Just 25 of the UK’s coach operators are currently Guild members, and Guild administrator Steve Whiteway says the organisation’s engineering audit standards go beyond those required by the DVSA to achieve Earned Recognition in some areas.
Whiteway estimates that 10% of all British coach operators have current Earned Recognition, and the Guild (which is run by a board of five elected members) took the view that all its members should be in this number by the end of 2026.
Guild member Pulhams Coaches of Gloucestershire combined both ER and Guild audits in a single exercise to achieve Earned Recognition and renewed Guild membership in one step, and for other members it also made sense to combine the process as audits came due, so the organisation could use the same process for both.
Whiteway says it has therefore adjusted the due dates for Guild engineering audits to suit its members’ path to Earned Recognition: both processes can then be carried out at the same time and by whichever approved auditor the member selects. The auditing process covers outcomes, so it is not dependent on engineering work being carried out in-house.
“It’s perfectly possible for an operator who has a fleet maintained on contract by an external workshop to achieve ER and Guild status. The status is won by outcomes, not by processes,” he explains.
ON THE GROUND
Jonathan Ede, managing director of Guild member Roselyn Coaches of Cornwall, pictured above, is working on obtaining Earned Recognition for his 48-strong fleet, which is maintained in the company’s own long-established workshops which also provide technical support such as PMIs for other operators in the region. He’s enthusiastic about the Earned Recognition project, but points out that some more experienced members of staff may still prefer working with physical paper rather than using tablets and electronic record-keeping.
“The younger ones are quick to embrace it,” he says.
“Driver daily checks are particularly vital: the first line of defence against any roadside defect or breakdown, and being able to incorporate digital records and photography into these is definitely a big step forward,” he says.
Another benefit of Guild membership is the promise of mutual assistance. On the day of Transport Engineer’s visit, his workshop was busy assembling a replacement mirror for fitment to a coach belonging to a Guild member visiting Cornwall from the Midlands.
He points out that many of the regional coach dealers and workshops did not survive Covid, leaving only the official importer for some marques. “When the only dealer is at the other end of the country, a fellow Guild member can often get help and parts to you far quicker than the official channels could.”
One area where the Guild’s standard is actually lower than that required for ER is first-time annual test pass rate: the Guild requires 90%, while DVSA wants 95%. “The Guild will bring its standard on this into alignment with DVSA,” Whiteway says.
Otherwise, it’s the case that Guild requirements are generally more wide-ranging than DVSA’s, as they cover a wide range of topics under headings including customer service standards, employee investment and so on. Within the engineering discipline, common topics are: transport manager, scheme compliance, walk-around checks, defect reporting, maintenance records, periodic safety checks, vehicle licence, OCRS roadworthiness, annual test first-time pass, review of failures, and avoiding and investigating prohibitions.
In addition, the Guild has its own engineering and fleet standards for meeting customer requirements, quality assurance, staff competence, replacement vehicles and sub-contractors, vehicle cleanliness and presentation, and CoachMarque vinyls.
Operators with Earned Recognition status who are undergoing Guild accreditation will not need to produce evidence on the common topics for auditing. Likewise, they will not need to show evidence of their current OCRS score for roadworthiness, their MOT annual test history, their DVSA Encounter Report, or samples of their standard driver walk-around check, defect reporting forms or safety inspection reports as these are assured by Earned Recognition status.
BOX: ER SELF-TESTING
In its response to government’s heavy vehicle testing review call for evidence, which closed 9 June, industry association Logistics UK has supported the move to allow Earned Recognition (ER) operators to either carry out their own MOT testing on vehicles and trailers or delegate the responsibility to their third-party maintenance provider, subject to them meeting additional compliance requirements.
Phil Lloyd, head of engineering policy at Logistics UK, comments: “Allowing ER operators to MOT test their own vehicles would increase efficiency and reduce costs for those operators as the booking of the test can be precisely scheduled along with the maintenance of the vehicle. This will reduce the time the vehicle is off the road significantly – a huge benefit to the businesses charged with delivering for the UK economy. These changes should also have a positive impact on emissions reduction as operators will not need to make additional journeys to a separate testing centre.
“Road safety must remain a priority: Logistics UK is therefore recommending that DVSA introduces a quality monitoring process to provide assurance that testing providers maintain high levels of compliance and safe operation of vehicles, and in the fullness of time this offering could be extended to other compliant operators.”