NHVR set to takeover functions in NSW

The National Heavy Vehicle Regulator, or NHVR, is taking over key regulatory functions, including heavy vehicle inspections, from Transport NSW on 1st August 2022.

“We’re going to go from an organisation of about 450 staff. We’re going to take over about 350 staff from Transport for NSW,” said Don Hogben, Chief Policy Officer at NHVR, speaking at the National Roads and Transport Expo in Sydney in May. “If you think about that as a merger and acquisition, it’s a fairly significant initiative for us,” he added.

The NHVR was established in 2013 as a statutory authority to administer the Heavy Vehicle National Law, which applies in all Australia’s states and territories except the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

The transition is part of a strategy to bring about consistent compliance for all heavy vehicles travelling across Australia; to do away with varying regulations across state borders.

“We’ve had different regulators really regulating in quite a different way. The experience in Victoria was very different from the experience in New South Wales historically, and we really want to bring that together,” said Hogben. 

NSW, where some half of all truck freight movements occur, is the fifth Australian jurisdiction—after South Australia, Victoria, Tasmania and the ACT—where the NHVR will be directly delivering heavy vehicle regulatory services.

Hogben said he expects NHVR to takeover heavy vehicle regulation from Queensland state’s authority next year.

The most noticeable change for transport operators when roadside enforcement, investigations, prosecutions, and scheduled heavy vehicle inspections will transfer to NHVR will be that the current Transport for NSW compliance operations inspectors will become NHVR safety and compliance officers.

The NHVR will continue to deliver services from the more than 200 existing heavy vehicle inspection stations, safety stations and on-road enforcement sites across NSW. 

Transport for NSW will continue to provide a number of other important heavy vehicle services, including licensing, registration and tow truck investigations and compliance.

Hogben took the opportunity at the expo talk to set out the history and vision and task of NHVR.

In a nutshell, the history is that under the constitution states have responsibility for transport. “The vision really was around creating a single authority for the heavy vehicle national law and effectively such that we get to a point where industry has the same experience and the same circumstances anywhere in Australia.” 

That vision led to the creation of the National Heavy Vehicle Law and to the establishment of the NHVR.

The heavy vehicle law applies to all road vehicles over four and half tonnes — from the Winnebago to the prime mover. Hogben said that amounts to more than a million heavy units, involving some 50,000 road freight businesses, and operating on around 900,000 kilometres of road.

Importantly, Hogben also said that the NHVR’s approach was to be risk based, rather than prescriptive. 

“It’s our intent for the NHVR to evolve into a modern risk-based, intelligence-led, data-driven regulator with values including strong partnerships and customer first,” said Hogben, noting, “There’s been a lot of criticism of the heavy vehicle regulators or the transport regulators in the road space for quite some time over being not particularly risk based, very much point and shoot. You know, nitpicking is something that continually gets brought up.”

Hogben said the possibilities of technology and the ability to collect and analyse enormous amounts of data was enabling NHVR to turn to a risk-based approach.

“I think it’s the right approach for the right time in history,” said Hogben. “The one size fits all and that sort of thing in modern society has its limitations,” he said, adding, ” Whilst we’ll do something under a consistent framework, we need to make sure that every response is appropriate to the circumstances, that we’re not doing the same thing to everybody and treating everybody the same.”