Decision

Decision for KEVIN ROY GRIGGS T/A KDT SKIPS AND WASTE REMOVAL

Updated 21 March 2023

0.1 EAST OF ENGLAND TRAFFIC AREA

1. DECISION OF THE DEPUTY TRAFFIC COMMISSIONER

2. PUBLIC INQUIRY AND DRIVER CONDUCT HEARING HELD ON 2 DECEMBER 2022 AND 3 FEBRUARY 2023

3. OPERATOR: KEVIN ROY GRIGGS T/A KDT SKIPS AND WASTE REMOVAL LICENCE OF2014805

4. DRIVER: KEVIN ROY GRIGGS

5. Background

Kevin Roy Griggs t/a KDT Skips and Waste Removal holds a restricted operator’s licence for two vehicles. There is one vehicle in possession. The licence was granted in August 2018.

On 21 July 2021 Mr Griggs was involved in an incident at the junction of the A12 and M25. A full report of the incident by PC Michael Collins of the Commercial Vehicle Unit is amongst the papers for the public inquiry. In brief, Mr Griggs was involved in a slight collision with another vehicle at the roundabout. He then forced that other vehicle off the road at the exit to the roundabout, jumped out of his cab swinging a table leg, threatened the other driver in an aggressive manner and at one point hit the other driver on the back with the table leg. He then drove off in a manner which was unsafe for other traffic.

Mr Griggs was arrested by Police on a week later on 28 July 2021 when a routine tachograph check revealed that he was wanted for assault. As well as finding the table leg in the vehicle, Police also found that Mr Griggs was in possession of a tachograph card belonging to his son Thomas as well as his own card. Interrogation of the data revealed several occasions in the preceding few weeks when Thomas’s tachograph card had been inserted at a point when Mr Griggs was approaching the 4.5 hours driving limit. The vehicle had then been driven on for a further one to two hours. Mr Griggs told police that he had been teaching his son Thomas to drive (Thomas Griggs at that time held a provisional C category licence). Asked why he had not put his own card in slot 2 if that were the case, Mr Griggs replied that he did not know he had to.

Kevin Roy Griggs was subsequently convicted at Snaresbrook Crown Court on 13 September 2021 of assault by beating, possession of an offensive weapon in a public place, using threatening behaviour and driving without due care and attention. He received 4 points on his licence for the motoring offence, one month’s imprisonment (suspended for 12 months) for possession of the weapon, one month’s imprisonment (also suspended for 12 months) for using threatening behaviour, and six months’ imprisonment (again suspended for 12 months) for the assault. He was also ordered to complete 100 hours of community service. Mr Griggs failed to notify any of these convictions to the traffic commissioner.

6. Public inquiry

PC Collins submitted his report on 26 October 2021. However, owing to the backlog of work in the Cambridge office, we were unfortunately not able to arrange a public inquiry (and parallel driver conduct hearing) until 2 December 2022, despite the urgency of the case.

Kevin Roy Griggs attended the inquiry and driver conduct hearing, represented by transport consultant Jim Marsh.

Mr Marsh and Mr Griggs together made the following points:

• Mr Griggs had held an HGV driver licence for 23 years. Other than the occasional speeding offence, he had never been in trouble;

• there were no other major compliance issues (although I did note a lack of brake testing);

• Mr Griggs had no record of violence. He had just had a terrible day on 21 July 2021 and had acted out of character. He kept the table leg in his HGV to use as a pole (with a sponge attached to the end) to clean his windscreen – it was not kept with violent intent;

• Mr Griggs had seen red when the other driver’s van bent his wing mirror forward while undertaking on the roundabout. It was so out of shape that he had had to heat it up at his yard in order to restore it to its position;

• he had never driven using his son Thomas’s card. He had been teaching his son on many occasions to drive an HGV. He always put L plates on when doing so and Thomas had inserted his tachograph card into the vehicle unit;

• the reason why so many swaps occurred approaching the 4.5 hours driving limit was that, as he knew he was running out of driving time, that was an appropriate moment to hand over to Thomas;

• the L plates were kept in the back of the cab: Mr Griggs had showed them to police during the stop on 28 July 2021;

• Thomas’s tachograph card was kept in a bag in the lorry for convenience, so that it was to hand when he took over the vehicle;

• revocation of the licence would destroy his business, on which several family members relied, including Thomas Griggs’s partner and child (Thomas having very sadly been killed in a motorbike accident, riding while disqualified, in the intervening period);

• Mr Marsh asked that I not find against Mr Griggs’s repute or his fitness to drive HGVs. A 1-2 week suspension of both o-licence and vocational entitlement would hurt the business but could be coped with.

• Mr Griggs was prepared to undertake to attend an operator licence management course by the end of February 2023.

I asked why, if Thomas travelled around with Kevin Roy Griggs in the vehicle waiting to take over, he had not been present in the cab on 21 July 2021, when the altercation took place. Mr Griggs stated that he would often go back to the yard to pick Thomas up. I note that on 21 July 2021 the swap over of drivers (at the yard according to Mr Griggs) took place when Mr Griggs had completed 4 hours 29 minutes of driving.

I adjourned the inquiry at this point, to make a written decision. Before doing so, I viewed the video footage of the incident on 21 July 2021 (taken from the dashcam of the other driver) as well as bodycam footage of the police stop of Mr Griggs on 28 July 2021. This video footage had not been available to me at the inquiry. The video footage prompted me to ask my clerk to put some supplementary questions to Mr Griggs. In response, he provided a statement to the effect that the L plates were in the vehicle and that he “most definitely did show them to the police”. He had pointed out to PC Collins where they were, behind the passenger seat.

In answer to my question about whether Thomas Griggs had applied to take an HGV driving test (he had held a provisional licence since 2012), Mr Griggs said that as far as aware he had not, but that HGV driver testing had been disrupted by Covid in 2021. Mr Griggs reiterated that he had never driven using Thomas’s card and would have no reason to do so: he did not work or drive for long hours.

In the event, because the video footage did not in my view wholly coincide with Mr Griggs’s account to me at the inquiry on 2 December 2022, I decided to reconvene the inquiry out of fairness to Mr Griggs. In viewing the videos, I had been struck by the following:

• while waiting at the traffic lights at the A12/M25 roundabout, Mr Griggs’s skip lorry had its front nearside tyre just the wrong side of the white line separating the outside lane (which his vehicle was in) from the next. His vehicle was poorly positioned.

• while the traffic lights were still at red, Mr Griggs’s vehicle rolled forward several yards, crossing the white stop line (his was the first vehicle in the queue). His vehicle strayed further into the adjacent lane, crowding out a small Nissan Micra which was correctly positioned in the adjacent lane. His vehicle then stopped, before proceeding again when the light turned green.

• from the dashcam footage it was clear that Mr Griggs performed an aggressive driving manoeuvre, cutting right across in front of the van as it attempted to exit the roundabout. The van was forced to a standstill in the live outside traffic lane.

• at one stage during the argument Mr Griggs had put the table leg back in his vehicle, only to return to the vehicle and seize it again and assault the other driver after the latter had pointed out that a dashcam was recording events.

• after the altercation was over, Mr Griggs drove off quickly, causing a hazard to other traffic. Another van only narrowly averted colliding with Mr Griggs’s vehicle (although the standard of driving by that van driver was not good either).

• the police bodycam video which recorded the stop of Mr Griggs on 28 July 2021 had good sound quality: I viewed it several times but Mr Griggs made no mention of any L-plates and did not show any to the police.

The inquiry and driver conduct hearing reconvened in Cambridge on 3 February 2023. PC (now Sergeant) Michael Collins also attended to answer any questions about his statement or the video footage. After viewing the footage, Mr Griggs accepted that he had not mentioned or shown the L plates to PC Collins. Mr Griggs stated that he kept the L plates behind the driver’s seat and the video showed that the Police had not searched there.

I asked Mr Griggs about his apparent poor standard of driving before the incident (straying into the next lane and moving forward several yards over the stop line well before the lights went green). Mr Griggs said that he had not been aware of this. I asked him why he had so aggressively cut across the van on the exit from the roundabout and forced it to stop in a live lane. Mr Griggs stated that the van had failed to stop after colliding with his mirror. He had brought it to a stop not on a live lane but on an area with hatched markings. A second view of the video together with an overhead view provided by Sgt Collins showed that Mr Griggs was mistaken: it was indeed a live lane.

I asked Sgt Collins what else had been in the bag in which Thomas Griggs’s tachograph card had been found. Was there anything else of Thomas’s? Sgt Collins stated that he had also found Kevin Roy Griggs’s driver CPC card and a number of other cards belonging to him.

In a discussion of why Thomas had been a provisional C category licence holder for so long without ever taking his test, Mr Griggs stated that he had been disqualified from driving for a time, had received an extended disqualification from HGV driving from the traffic commissioner and had only just got his provisional entitlement back before lockdown.

During the adjournment I had asked my clerk to put the question to the Police of whether it was feasible for tachograph cards to be swapped over in the same minute, as had happened on several occasions, given the sign off routine and sign on routine that drivers had to go through. The Police reply referred to the need for a new driver to conduct a walk-round check lasting several minutes, but I did not consider that this really answered the question. At the reconvened inquiry, Mr Marsh presented several tachograph unit reports which showed that, while the cards might have been swapped within one minute, the vehicle had usually been stationary for longer periods of time. The vehicle had not normally been driven on in the same minute. Sgt Collins confirmed that the actual card swap might be done within a minute.

Mr Marsh reiterated that Mr Griggs was offering no excuses for the assault. He had been in a bad place at the time. The offence had been almost two years ago and things were completely different now. Revocation would mean the end of the business and would have a disastrous knock-on effect on the family finances.

7. Consideration

The Upper Tribunal confirmed in the case of Redsky Wholesalers Ltd (T/2013/07) that “fitness” [applicable to restricted licence holders] is not a significantly lower hurdle than the requirement for standard licence holders to be of good repute. In his summing up, Mr Marsh acknowledged as much. I note that Kevin Roy Griggs has been convicted of several offences, one of which is defined as “serious” in Schedule 3 of the 1995 Act because a prison sentence exceeding three months has been imposed.

I consider first the issue of whether or not Kevin Roy Griggs was using his son Thomas’s tachograph card. He was not prosecuted for this offence because the evidential test for prosecution was not met. However, I am concerned by several issues:

• Sgt Collins’s tachograph analysis identified 13 occasions in a four-week period when Kevin Roy Griggs had removed his tachograph card after having driven for approaching 4.5 hours (more than 4 hours 20 minutes on nine of these occasions) and Thomas’s card had been inserted shortly thereafter. Mr Griggs explained that Thomas was helping him with work and would take over as Mr Griggs approached the 4.5 hour limit. However, on the one day on which we have evidence of who was in the cab (21 July 2021), Mr Griggs was alone. He stated that he later picked up Thomas at the yard: if so, it was extraordinarily serendipitous that Mr Griggs got back to the yard at exactly 4 hours 29 minutes of driving;

• I am not satisfied with the explanation for carrying Thomas’s card in the vehicle. Thomas’s card was present in a pouch containing at least one other card belonging to Kevin Roy Griggs. It seems odd to keep two drivers’ cards mixed up in this way;

• Mr Griggs claimed not to be aware of the need to insert his card into slot 2. He also seems to have been unaware of the requirement for a driver to take a break after 4.5 hours of driving. Supervising driving by a learner should be recorded as “other work”: even assuming Mr Griggs’s account is correct, he should not have carried on in the cab without first taking a break;

• I accept that Mr Griggs did not appear to drive or work for very long hours. However, it is not correct to say that there could be no reason for using someone else’s tachograph card. By using Thomas’s card to drive on after 4.5 hours instead of taking a break, Mr Griggs would be able to finish work sooner than he would otherwise have done;

• I did not find Mr Griggs to be a very reliable witness. He claimed at the inquiry on 2 December 2022 and in a subsequent written statement that he had definitely mentioned the L plates to (then) PC Collins and showed them to him. Sgt Collins stated at the hearing on 3 February 2023 that there had been no mention of L plates and the body cam footage confirms this. I note too that in his statement provided after the inquiry in December Mr Griggs said that the L plates were kept behind the passenger’s seat, while at the reconvened inquiry in February he stated that they were kept behind the driver’s seat. Moreover, although Mr Griggs at first claimed that he had brought the other van to a stop on a hatched area of road, this was shown to be untrue. I therefore place limited reliance on the accuracy of Mr Griggs’s statements.

On the balance of probabilities (the evidential test applicable in this case), I conclude that it is more likely than not that Kevin Roy Griggs did make use of Thomas’s tachograph card. For his account to be true, too many unlikely turns of events and too many coincidences have to be accepted. However, because the consequences of such conduct would be exceptionally serious, a heavier degree of probability is required for such a finding. I therefore have stopped just short of making a formal finding that Kevin Roy Griggs used his son Thomas’s tachograph card.

8. Findings: conduct as a driver

From the video it was clear that Mr Griggs’s standard of driving was very poor. A professional HGV driver is expected to be able to keep his vehicle within lane markings and not to cross stop lines when traffic lights are still red. But it is his ensuing conduct that was the most reprehensible. While I can understand that he might have been irritated by the clash with his wing mirror (although his poor lane discipline was in a strong measure to blame for this) it is totally unacceptable to cut in front of the other vehicle and force it stop on a live lane (on a very busy exit to the roundabout) and then emerge from the cab waving an offensive weapon around in an extremely aggressive manner. Still less is it acceptable to then assault another driver with that weapon. Nor was the incident just a moment of madness: Mr Griggs had actually put the table leg (the approximate size and shape of a baseball bat) back in his cab before taking it out again and hitting the driver with it. The appalling driving, without consideration for the safety of other road users, and the ensuing rage-filled assault are not the conduct of a professional driver. I find that Kevin Roy Griggs’s conduct as a driver means that he is not a fit person to hold a licence to drive large goods vehicles.

9. Findings: operator

After having considered the evidence, I make the following findings regarding the operator licence:

Mr Griggs has failed to fulfil his undertaking to notify convictions within 28 days to the traffic commissioner (Section 26(1)(f) of the 1995 Act refers);

he has also failed to fulfil his undertaking to ensure that vehicles are driven in a lawful manner (viz his conviction for driving without due care and attention);

he has failed to fulfil his undertaking to ensure that rules relating to drivers’ hours and tachographs are observed. Even if he did not drive using someone else’s tachograph card, he certainly failed to insert his card in slot 2 as required and failed to take the required breaks on these 13 occasions in a 28 day period;

Mr Griggs has been convicted of a serious criminal offence (assault) and several other related offences (possession of a weapon in a public place; using threatening behaviour). He received a total of three prison sentences (all suspended) and a 100 hour Community Service Order for the offences;

because of these convictions, there has been a material change to the licence (Section 26(1)(h) of the 1995 Act refers).

10. Conclusions

I conducted a balancing act. On the positive side, there were no serious compliance issues on the maintenance side, and Mr Griggs has not committed offences of violence before this incident or since. But on the negative side the incident was of an exceptionally serious and shocking nature. The public have a right to drive on the road without an operator using his skip lorry to force another vehicle to stop in a wholly inappropriate location causing danger to other road users. Other road users should not be subject to the abuse and violence dealt out by Mr Griggs, no matter what the excuse (and Mr Griggs was at least as much to blame for the clash of wing mirrors as the other driver). This is a very weighty negative which heavily outweighs the positive factors above. The inescapable conclusion is that Kevin Roy Griggs is not fit to hold an operator’s licence.

Having seen the way in which Mr Griggs used the threat of violence as a first resort, I cannot be confident that if the circumstances were repeated he would not act in a similar way. I therefore answer the Priority Freight question in the negative. Mr Marsh was most eloquent on behalf of his client, but I nevertheless answer the Bryan Haulage question in the positive: the incident of 21 July 2021 was so serious as to merit the operator being put out of business. There is no place on Britain’s roads for a goods vehicle operator behaving like Mr Griggs did that day.

11. Decisions

For the reasons outlined above, I am revoking the LGV driving entitlement of Kevin Roy Griggs under Section 115 of the Road Traffic Act 1988. Under Section 117 of that Act I am disqualifying him from holding such entitlement for a period of 12 months.

Because I have also concluded that Kevin Roy Griggs is not fit to hold an operator’s licence and deserves to go out of business, I am also revoking his operator licence under Section 26(1)(f) and (h). The revocation will take effect on 13 March 2023, giving Mr Griggs time to recover any skips which may need to be brought back.

I have also considered whether to disqualify Mr Griggs from holding or obtaining an operator’s licence and from being the director of any company holding or obtaining such a licence. In considering this, I have had regard to paragraph 105 of the Senior Traffic Commissioner’s Statutory Guidance Document No 10. Because of the exceptionally serious nature of the operator’s conduct I consider that a disqualification is appropriate: it would make little sense to revoke Mr Griggs’s operator licence and then immediately entertain a fresh application from him. I note that the offence of assault by beating (the most serious of his offences) becomes spent on 13 March 2024 (two years after the end of his six month prison sentence). I consider that an appropriate end point for a disqualification and my disqualification order will therefore run until that date.

Nicholas Denton

Deputy Traffic Commissioner

10 February 2023