Heavy vehicle safety compliance is more than a box-ticking exercise—it’s the backbone of a responsible and resilient transport sector. This week, I had the pleasure of attending a site visit at NRC member Downer’s Penrose Plant, where I saw first-hand what best practice looks like in action.

Downer’s approach is refreshingly straightforward: regular gate checks for their trucks exiting the plant, with rigorous verification of logbooks, Certificates of Fitness (COF), and driver licences. 

The team’s commitment to compliance was evident, not only in their processes but also in the culture they foster— this time a breakfast BBQ for staff set a positive tone and reinforced the value placed on safety and teamwork. It’s a simple gesture, but it speaks volumes about the way Downer encourages its people to take pride in doing things right. 

For the vehicle walk around, Downer have an app in place for their vehicle pool, which runs the driver through a checklist that they respond to, and once completed sign off. This gets sent into a central database for fleet compliance management.

The Downer gate check and app are great examples of what good looks like for meeting compliance.

However, even with robust processes like this in place, what we have learned is if a fraudulent transport operator acts with criminal deception, they can slip through the net with disastrous consequences.

For customers and industry partners, it remains difficult to get visibility of which operators are truly compliant. Gate checks are one way to raise standards, but we need more upstream visibility if we want better surety that non-compliant transport operators are weeded out. 

Customers and procurers must be able to view a reliable record of who the compliant operators are—and who the cowboys are.

We have a companies register to verify business legitimacy. It’s time for a TSL (Transport Service Licence) register to verify the compliance record of transport operators, accessible by customers and industry partners alike. This would provide the transparency our sector needs to drive safety and accountability. 

National Road Carriers and other transport industry associations have been calling for a  thorough review of the TSL system for a number of years now. It is well past its use by date, too easy to get and too hard to lose. We are finally starting to see signs of progress in Wellington after our efforts, and a TSL review may be closer than we think – watch this space.

Thank you to Andrew Wallace, Stuart Chapman and Mike Thorley at Downer for hosting and setting the standard. If we want a safer, fairer industry, we must make compliance visible, valued, and rewarded. 

Stuart Chapman and Mike Thorley at Downer with Justin Tighe-Umbers

Let’s get on with it.

Justin Tighe-Umbers, Chief Executive, National Road Carriers Assn