A HGV driver ignored safety laws and skipped mandatory breaks when driving for long periods in order to get home early to save his marriage.

The driver broke the law and driving protocols when he bypassed a system to monitor drivers' movements when working in order to avoid taking 45-minute breaks required by EU law after a driver had been travelling for four and a half hours.

While his employers believed he was following the rules, the driver regularly drove during breaks so he could get to his home in Pontyclun in Wales at an earlier time.

A sentencing hearing at Cardiff Crown Court was told EU driving regulations required commercial drivers to have a tachograph fitted to their vehicle in order to record speed, distance, and driver activity. While data is stored on a tachograph unit fixed to the vehicle drivers are also required to insert a tachograph card when driving to record data and enable monitoring by their respective employers.

Prosecutor Christopher Evans said the driver had been removing his tachograph card from the unit while driving to give the impression he was taking breaks but he continued to drive without stopping. This occurred on 13 occasions between March 22 and August 17 last year.

On one occasion, on May 18, the defendant had been been driving for 10 hours and seven minutes throughout the day with the maximum daily limit under EU law being 10 hours of driving but he removed his card and drove for a further 57 minutes in order to get home.

The breaches came to light in August 2020 when the Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) inspected Bridgend Biomass Ltd and found a number of deficiencies. As a result, they took tachographs from each of the company's drivers and examined them, which resulted in them finding discrepancies between the recordings on the drivers tachograph unit and card.

The driver was sentenced to six months imprisonment suspended for 18 months and was ordered to carry out 120 hours unpaid work and to pay £750 towards court costs.