Operator rating system

How your rating is calculated

Your operator rating safety will be calculated based on:

• The number, and severity, of faults founds during CoF and roadside inspections
• How serious offences are, and
• When any of these things happened – so more recent events will score higher than events that are older.

Your crash history will also be recorded but will not form part of the rating calculation.

The scores will be calculated by a computer programme specially developed for the purpose. The programme has been independently reviewed and quality assured by a statistics expert. The safety-related risks relevant to transport operators, drivers and vehicles have also been independently studied, and this study will have a role in the weightings assigned to each type of event.

Your scores will be weighted according to how serious a risk to road safety events are. For example, if offences you may be involved in pose the highest risk to road safety they will contribute more to your rating - your rating will be poorer - than other types of events, such as CoF inspections.

CoF and roadside faults

Some CoF and roadside faults pose a bigger safety risk. For example, brakes, lighting and tyres play a greater part in vehicle safety that issues with the cab or speedometer. Because the faults will be weighted, the more serious faults in terms of road safety will be reflected by a poorer rating for you.

Similarly, more serious offences, such as drink driving, speeding or careless driving, will have a greater impact on the rating than less serious offences.

Events will be “aged” so that the longer ago an event happened, the less effect it has on the safety rating.

The way your scores are calculated also takes into account other factors, such as the number of times a vehicle is inspected over a certain rating period and the amount of time a vehicle or driver spends on the road. For example, operators will not be advantaged or disadvantaged by having multiple roadside inspections, and their “exposure” or distance travelled on the road will be taken into account when calculating their offence score.

Scores will be allocated to a single transport service licence (TSL). That means that operators with more than one TSL will have a score calculated for each TSL separately, and these scores won’t be combined into a single score for that operator.

If a vehicle changes hands during the rating period the events will be allocated to the operator responsible for the vehicles when the event happened.

Page created: 3 August 2009