What the traffic office holds

A movement cannot be traced once the goods have left the deck unless a signature is taken where they land.

The signed consignment note carries the name of the person who received the goods, the point of delivery and the condition the goods were in at that moment. That signed copy is filed against the booking reference in the traffic office and read alongside the booking whenever a question is raised about the drop. A written statement of any entry on the note is issued back through whichever channel the booking arrived on, so a sender who booked by e-mail receives it by e-mail.

Held while a carriage claim can still be brought against the movement. Expiry of that claim period ends the retention.

A collection cannot be planned unless the vehicle can be sent to a specific door and a person there can be reached about it.

The booking record holds the collection and delivery addresses, a contact name, a telephone number or an e-mail address for the receiving point, and the description of the goods given by the sender. It stays live while the movement is in progress and stays on file afterwards as the account of what was instructed, which is what the note is then read against. Once a booking has closed, the record is consulted only when a question about that movement arises.

Held until the customer account closes and the statutory accounting period over it has run out.

A claim about damage cannot be answered from the note alone, because the note records the state of the goods and the driver records the circumstances of the drop.

A claim file holds the marked note, the driver's written account, any photographs the receiving point supplied and the correspondence that followed. The two accounts are read together, since each of them answers a question the other cannot. Once the file is settled it is closed, and the correspondence in it stays attached to the booking it concerns.

Held while the claim is open and for the limitation period that runs after settlement. The end of that period closes the file.

A message sent to the traffic office cannot be answered, or evidenced afterwards as having been answered, unless it is kept.

Correspondence sent to transport@valicontrans.buzz is retained in the office mailbox with the sender's address, the content of the message and the reply. That address reaches the transport office at Slough and is read by the people who plan the vehicles, so an enquiry and its answer stay in one thread. Once an exchange has produced a booking, it joins the booking record and is read as part of it.

Correspondence that produced no booking is held for a short enquiry period; correspondence that produced one follows the retention stated in section 02.

A carriage charge cannot be evidenced to an inspector unless the invoice behind it survives the year it was raised in.

Accounting records hold the invoice, the booking it relates to, the customer's billing address and the payment made against it. They are held separately from the operational records, since the question they answer is a question about the company rather than about a movement. By then the movement itself may be long closed, and the invoice is the only remaining account of what was carried and for whom.

Held for the statutory period that applies to a company's tax and accounting documents. Expiry of that period ends the retention.

A goods vehicle cannot be operated lawfully unless driving time, rest and vehicle condition are recorded as they occur.

Tachograph data, driver defect reports and maintenance records are held for the vehicles worked from the operating centre at Slough. They are made available to the traffic examiner on request, which is the purpose the enforcement rules keep them for. Once a vehicle leaves the fleet its records remain for the balance of the prescribed period, because the period attaches to the work done rather than to the vehicle.

Held for the period the enforcement rules require. Expiry of the prescribed period ends the retention.

A page cannot show a figure the reader has typed unless something works the arithmetic, and the nearest thing to the reader is the browser itself.

These pages are static files. The deck footprint calculator and the band finder are worked by a small script that runs inside the visitor's own browser, so the millimetres, the pallet counts and the ring chosen are read there and written back to the same page. The arithmetic that each of them prints line by line is the whole of what either does. The only way a figure reaches the transport office is by a reader writing to the office address and stating it.

Entries typed into either calculator live for as long as the page is open in the browser, and closing the page ends them.

A page cannot be set in the typefaces it was designed in unless the browser fetches those typefaces.

This site asks the visitor's browser to request the Bitter and Encode Sans families from Google's font servers. The browser opens that connection to Google on its own account, and doing so puts before Google what every web connection puts before a host: the network address the call came from, and the browser's own statement of what it is. What Google keeps of that exchange sits on Google's systems under Google's terms.

Loading the page from a cache that already holds the fonts ends the request.

An entry cannot be corrected, copied out or objected to unless the person it concerns can first see it.

A request made in writing to the traffic office is logged with the identity checks that establish who is asking, and it is answered from the records described on this sheet. The log exists so that the handling of the request can itself be reviewed afterwards. Once the answer has gone out, the log stays with the request rather than with the records it was made against.

Held for the period a supervisory authority can review how the request was handled. Expiry of that period ends it.

The controller of every record described on this sheet is VALICON TRANS LTD of 595 London Road, Slough, SL3 8QG, United Kingdom, and a request is made to the transport office at transport@valicontrans.buzz.