One of the nasty side effects of the advent of unmanned speed cameras has been the resulting surge in the amount of requests made by the Police (pursuant to Section 172 of the Road Traffic Act 1988) to businesses requesting them to identify the drivers of their vehicles. Previously these requests were not so common because it was easy for the Police to identify the driver because vehicles were stopped at the time of the incident. Now, in the vast majority of speeding offences, that no longer occurs and so the Police now need businesses to be able to identify the drivers of their vehicles.
If you run a business which owns many vehicles that may be driven by various different people (for example, car dealerships that permit vehicles to be test driven by potential customers, or allow employees free access to their vehicles) identifying the driver may prove difficult. Unfortunately the Police and increasingly the Courts simply “do not take no for an answer”. The law requires businesses which allow employees or others to drive vehicles registered to them to keep detailed records of the drivers of their vehicles. If no such records are kept, then unless a business is able to convince a Court that it was unreasonable to expect it to keep such records, a simple inability to identify the driver will lead to a criminal conviction.
Worse still, at least one local Court is convinced that many businesses are deliberately not identifying drivers and are happy to accept fines on behalf of drivers of their vehicles so as to avoid those driving being given penalty points on their Licence. As a result, this Court has indicated that it is now, as a matter of policy, imposing the maximum fine of £1,000 on each occasion that a business fails to identify a driver of one of its vehicles.
There is little doubt that other Courts will also be adopting a similar policy.
To avoid such a fine, a business needs to be able to satisfy the Court that it did all that it could (in the way of records etc) to enable it to identify all drivers of its vehicles. Alternatively, if no records are kept the business needs to be able to convince the Court that it would be unreasonable to expect it to keep such records.
For further information, please contact Jennifer Sewell from Rollits Regulatory Group on 01482 337368, email jennifer.sewell@rollits.com.
Jennifer Sewell
This article is for general guidance only and action should not be taken without obtaining specific advice.
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