MIKE Bradbury landed in court for doing the kind of thing he’s done every working day for the past 40 years – and the case he won could now be a legal landmark.

The roadside stop of Mr Bradbury’s Unimog tractor with its load of old fence posts challenged the right of agricultural vehicles to be on the public highway.

But his legal team met that challenge head on.

Now, his case has cleared up the law that allows him and others do it to.

A fencing contractor from Hoarwithy with 40 years in the industry, Mr Bradbury was served with five summonses after the stop on the A49 at The Callow in July last year by the Vehicle Operator Services Agency (VOSA).

Those summonses related to Mr Bradbury driving his agricultural specification Unimog on the road.

Mr Bradbury was stopped under the Vehicles Excise and Regulation Act 1994 which, at its simplest, states that anyone driving a vehicle on the road including a trailer, with a combined weight of 3,500kgs, requires an operator’s (O) licence.

The driver is also required to hold a C and E class driving licence equivalent to the old HGV licence.

But there is an exception to these requirements if a driver is engaged in agriculture, including an agricultural contractor – and this exemption also applies to the requirements for a road fund licence or tax disc, which is zero-rated.

Having already taken appropriate advice from both the NFU and VOSA, Mr Bradbury was confident he was operating within the law.

It wasn’t until the day before the trial that Mr Bradbury and his legal team from Shrewsburybased Lanyon Bowdler knew why he might not have been.

They discovered VOSA had built its case on the fenceposts, claiming carrying them meant the Unimog was used for “hire and reward” to do a job on a farm.

Mr Bradbury maintained that the fenceposts were effectively surplus materials that he had not got round to disposing of, and his fast-thinking legal team found no definition of “hire and reward” in the legislation.

“As Mr Bradbury was an agricultural contractor engaged to do work on the farm for the farmer, hire and reward could not possibly have been the case,”

said solicitor Ros Caldicott.

“It would have been different if, for example, Mr Bradbury had been transporting goods or grain to a depot on behalf of the farmer, then he would indeed have needed an O licence.”

The Lanyon Bowdler argument also confirmed the Unimog’s status as an agricultural vehicle.

Though he escaped a big fine and having to pay out for an O licence, Mr Bradbury says his victory has still cost him and his wife “great stress and anxiety”

when he was at all times operating within the law.