The UK’s largest truck maker has been accused of “stringing out” legal proceedings to “deny justice” to about 11,000 truck hauliers seeking compensation for the manufacturers’ historical price fixing.
The comments from the head of the Road Haulage Association (RHA) came almost nine years after the world’s largest truck companies, including UK leader DAF, Volvo, MAN and Iveco, were fined about €3bn by the European Union for colluding for 14 years on pricing and passing on the costs of compliance with stricter emission rules.
They also came seven years after the RHA launched its initial £1bn compensation claim against the guilty manufacturers on behalf of hauliers, many of which are small family-run businesses with only a handful of vehicles in their fleets.
Richard Smith, the managing director of the RHA, said: “The manufacturers have been driving up costs with the purpose being to deny claimants money in their pockets that they deserve.”
The years of delays, some caused by the Covid pandemic, have reduced the number of hauliers seeking compensation by more than a third.
“When we started the claim we had 17,500 companies that registered an interest,” Smith said. “We now have 11,400 signed up. Over the seven years we have lost 6,000 [claimants] … The manufacturers hope that we will go away. We are not going to do that.”
He added that he and his team had received “letters about people who have died” and had been “asked to remove them from the claim”.
The RHA’s legal claim is understood to revolve around about 200,000 trucks of which 30% are thought by the trade body to have been supplied by the UK’s leading supplier, DAF. The RHA says it is seeking compensation of more than £6,000 per truck.
Smith alleged that manufacturers had used legal tactics to frustrate the trade body’s claim – including DAF stating in court that it would settle the case, only to then back away from the pledge.
Meanwhile, the hauliers’ claim was further delayed in 2023 when DAF won a two-year case examining if the RHA’s legal action could be financed by litigation funders – who pay for legal costs in return for taking a share of any eventual award.
The supreme court ended up ruling that the RHA’s funding arrangement was unenforceable because of the technical details of how the finance deal had been structured. This led to Therium, the litigation funders that also backed the subpostmasters’ claims against the Post Office, having to rework its agreement with the RHA so that it would be paid a multiple of its initial investment, rather than a percentage of any compensation.
“Claimants would not have been able to afford this type of justice on their own,” Smith added. “They wouldn’t have been at the table [without litigation funders].”
The delays to the RHA claim comes after Royal Mail and BT were awarded approximately £17.5m in damages against DAF last year, after a decision by the UK’s Competition Appeal Tribunal relating to the same European cartel ruling.
DAF Trucks was approached for comment.
