Clause 23 - Breach of duty to give information as to identity of driver etc.
Road Safety Bill
9:45 am
Mr Greg Knight (Shadow Minister, Environment and Transport; East Yorkshire, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 48, in clause 23, page 26, line 31, leave out '6' and insert '3 to 6.'.
I have long been an advocate of pre-legislative scrutiny because when Ministers publish a Bill and it is examined by the House in Committee, there is a danger that they tend to defend it as drafted and to regard any amendment as a personal attack. I hope that Ministers in this Committee will not take that attitude because we are trying to make improvements.
I think that I understand the weakness in the law that the Minister wants to address. He can intervene if I am wrong. The problem is when someone who would receive more than three points on his licence for driving a motor vehicle at quite a high speed decides deliberately to tell the authorities when he receives a notice through the post a few days later that he has no recollection of the incident and no idea who was driving his vehicle. That is an attempt to prevent the courts from imposing a fairly harsh punishment for a serious case of speeding. For the offence of not supplying the name of the driver, he receives just three points.
However, just moving from three to six points and giving the courts no discretion and no ability to consider the circumstances of the case means that injustices could occur. I will give the Minister an example from my personal knowledge. During the recent European elections, a team of Euro-candidates were offered two vehicles by a supporter of my party to use during the election campaign. They accepted the use of those vehicles and they were delivered to one of the candidates, who notionally had responsibility for them both, although obviously he could not drive both of them at once. Over two weeks, the vehicles were driven by the candidates and their supporters. As might be expected during an election campaign, no one kept a log of who was driving at any one particular time. It was not a business. The insurance was for any driver. Anyone who was on the team had the opportunity to drive one or both of the vehicles.
The candidate may have a valid defence in that he should not reasonably be expected to know who was driving the vehicles at every moment, but if he does not and he is found guilty, it seems to me—the vehicle was only just over the speed limit so it was not one of the more serious cases that I mentioned—that the courts would be justified in giving him three points. They would not be justified in giving him six points, but that is the effect that the clause would have. It is intended to mandate the courts, in every case, to impose six points, even for the most minor transgression of speeding.
The amendment does not seek to require an ultra-lenient option, but merely to give the courts the discretion to decide, in the circumstances of the case, whether they should give three or six points. For example, a business man with nine points on his licence who drives at an excessive speed and gives no explanation of why he does not know who was driving his vehicle would justifiably be awarded six points.
Let us consider a case in which someone loans his vehicle in the circumstances I described, not necessarily during an election, but where voluntary work was being carried out and half a dozen people who were properly insured had the use of the vehicle, but the owner did not keep a log. If the courts feel that his error in not keeping a log of who was driving was a genuine mistake—that he did not understand the requirements of the law or of the predicament that he might get into—it is reasonable that they should say that the offence itself is fairly minor. In those circumstances, the courts should award only three points.
I can see why the Minister wants to amend the law, but the courts ought to have discretion, so that where genuine mitigating circumstances exist, they can take those into account.