NZTA admits failing over dodgy Wofs
WELLINGTON: The NZ Transport Agency has ‘‘failed everyone’’ over dodgy warrants of fitness exposed by a fatal car crash, according to the chairman of its own board.
But there was no talk of the agency’s chief executive standing down, despite the industry saying it had been raising the alarm for years about vehicle inspectors cutting corners.
The agency has admitted knowing since 2011 that Dargaville Diesel Specialists was failing to do critical checks for Wofs, but has been taking an educational approach instead of enforcing the safety rules.
The garage was only suspended in August, and now was on track to have its authority completely revoked, after investigations of a fatal car crash in January showed a frayed front seatbelt had failed. Frontseat passenger William Ball died from his injuries after the crash.
The owners of nearly 2000 vehicles given warrants by the Dargaville garage are now having to get them rechecked
‘‘This is a pretty horrific event and as [chief executive] Fergus [Gammie] has said, NZTA has let everyone down,’’ said Michael Stiassny, brought in last April to chair the agency’s board.
He called in top lawyers last month to take control of road safety compliance off the agency.
But he was not asking Mr Gammie to step down. ‘‘We’re not discussing whether Fergus is accountable or not. What we are discussing is that we are having an independent review and we will see what that review says.
‘‘The responsibility and culpability of people in the organisation, and outside the organisation, is clearly open to debate.’’
The Dargaville case would not be the end of revelations about the regulatory failings, Mr Stiassny said.
‘‘We’ve made it abundantly clear there will be more.’’
Three other areas of vehicle inspections have already been shown to be compromised.
Steps taken to fix the deficiencies would be done properly rather than quickly, he said.
The fixes are costing the taxpayer millions of dollars, which will cover almost 1500 truck decertifications in the South Island, hiring a bevy of top lawyers, and now warrant of fitness rechecks on vehicles in the Far North.
Years of warnings about going soft on road safety had been ignored, Motor Industry Association chief executive David Crawford said.
‘‘It’s been very difficult to get attention previously at a senior management and board level.’’
‘‘I gather that has all changed — the question is why did we wait so long for it to change?’’
He was briefed when he took the job in 2013 that truck certifications were a real problem, but had hit a ‘‘brick wall’’ raising this with the government or officials.
The Motor Industry Association believed a few ‘‘outliers’’ were to blame for poor inspections, though Mr Crawford acknowledged that even if only 10% of garages were ‘‘cowboys’’, that amounted to hundreds of thousands of possibly flawed inspections.
Truck certification was a big ger problem than cars, he said — but again conceded that without hard data or a reliable official audit system, it was impossible to gauge.
RNZ asked the Transport Agency to specify what measures it had taken since it was alerted by the Dargaville case several months ago, in order to gauge how many garages were cheating on Wofs.
So far, Mr Gammie has said: ‘‘We are acting very quickly on this to ensure that this cannot happen again.’’
It took eight months since the crash for the agency to suspend the Dargaville garage.
Mr Gammie has avoided the question of whether he should resign. —RNZ