The licence, which covered four vehicles, was revoked with effect from 14 July 2026. Deputy Traffic Commissioner Giles Pengelly published his written decision on 24 September, concluding he could no longer trust the operator to run compliantly.
The case began in November 2025, when one of the firm’s vehicles was stopped near Stafford with an insecure load. The driver received a fixed penalty notice, while other issues identified during the stop triggered a DVSA maintenance investigation at the company’s Birmingham base.
Pengelly found that two letters sent to the DVSA during the investigation contained “deliberate lies”. One claimed a driver had already been completing a defect-report book, which the company later admitted was not true — no such books had been in use before the Stafford stop.
Defect notes presented as having been written before preventative maintenance inspections had, in fact, been produced afterwards and back-dated to make it appear that a proper safety system was already in place. Some records also carried fake signatures.
Director Martin Ray was separately found to have given the DVSA a false explanation for why historical defect books could not be produced.
The maintenance failings themselves were also serious. Brake testing had not been carried out at all during some inspections. Even after the firm promised to conduct laden roller brake tests at every inspection, the Commissioner found an unladen test in January, no brake test at all in March, and another unladen test in April.
Pengelly said the failure to carry out proper brake testing put road safety at risk and gave the operator an unfair advantage over competitors that incurred the cost of complying with the rules.
Drivers’ daily walkaround checks were also found wanting. Defect-report books were introduced after the initial investigation, but inspectors continued to find driver-detectable defects with no corresponding report on file.
The firm had also received three prohibitions for insecure loads between March 2024 and November 2025, including one issued while a director was driving.
The Commissioner did acknowledge some improvements. The operator had a 0% MOT failure rate, brought in new consultants from April 2026, and introduced better driver training, tighter load-security instruction and a wheel-nut torque monitoring system.
However, he concluded that the changes had come too late, pointing to the limited progress made between the original DVSA findings in December 2025 and the consultants’ arrival four months later.
The company proposed alternatives to revocation, including a temporary suspension or reducing its authorisation to three vehicles alongside continued consultancy support and a future audit. Pengelly rejected those proposals.
“I cannot trust this operator to run a compliant operation,” he concluded.
The directors were not disqualified from holding an operator’s licence in future, although the Commissioner said any fresh application would need to demonstrate that the lessons from the case had been learned.
