Officials from the European Labour Authority, the agency responsible for enforcing labour regulations, conducted a week-long series of roadside inspections on industrial vehicles and buses in eleven European countries: Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia, the Netherlands, Romania, Slovakia and Spain. The operation involved 263 local inspectors supported by 66 colleagues from ten other countries, who jointly checked 564 trucks. A total of 194 vehicles were found to be fully compliant, although the criteria for determining full compliance may vary from country to country. For the remaining vehicles, inspectors identified 774 violations, resulting in fines totalling more than 210,000 euros.
The most common breaches involved exceeding legal driving hours, failing to respect rest periods, and irregularities related to tachographs, including tampering, driving without a driver card, or using uncalibrated devices. Inspectors also uncovered cases of undeclared or under-declared work, and many vehicles were found to be circulating without the required documentation, such as the community licence.
Ela highlighted one particularly concerning case in Austria, where local authorities, assisted by inspectors from Croatia, Germany and Slovenia, inspected 47 buses operating cross-border passenger transport services. Some of these vehicles were transporting school groups. The findings were alarming: nine drivers were caught manipulating their tachographs, and thirteen buses were found to be in such poor technical condition that they were declared unfit to continue their journeys. The number plates of these vehicles were confiscated on the spot.
