Dodgy drivers with as many as 45 points exposed by DVLA

A driver who clocked up a record 45 points on his driving license in a nine-month offending spree is still on the road, new research has showed.

Freedom of Information (FOI) requests revealed how the Liverpudlian driver racked up the points over eight offences by either failing to disclose the identity of the driver or speeding between October 1 2012 and June 20 2013.

These offences smashed through the previous record of 42 points, according to the Institute of Advanced Motorists (IAM) who launched the FOI requests.

Source

A joke isn't it. They should name the individual and explain why they feel he can still be on the roads when he obviously has no skills or respect to drive on them.

The courts can choose not to impose a ban if they think it would cause exceptional hardship, but they must ignore any circumstances which have already been used to avoid a totting ban in the last 3 years. So while in theory there's no limit to the number of times you can avoid a ban, in practice you'd have to have a lot of very unusual circumstances to do it more than once or twice and to rack up more than 15 or so points and keep your licence. And contrary to popular opinion, magistrates tend not to be completely stupid...

So I suspect that most of these cases are either (a) admin/IT cock-ups where the court hasn't been aware of the diver's history or (b) someone who commits a lot of offences in a short time period and has them all dealt with in a single court hearing, so only has to make a single hardship plea.

An example of (b) would be a case I read about on a solicitor's blog of an HGV driver who failed to notice a temporary speed limit on a road he obviously drove a lot, and by the time the first NIP arrived he'd already been caught 9 times by the same set of average speed cameras. Is that ban-worthy? The magistrates obviously thought not, and let him keep driving despite his 27 points. Another hypothetical example would be a person who gets home from several months abroad and finds that the person he left the car with has been driving like a knob, that there are 5 unopened NIPs on the doormat and that the deadline for replying to them has already passed... But of course, the full details of cases like that wouldn't make as good a headline as "driver with a squillion points keeps licence"

as an aside, all the people listed with 30 point+ seem to involve failure to declare, i think it's people in charge of fleet vehicles who didn't keep proper records who have ended up with the points applied to their license, only excuse that makes sense anyway.

Often you'll find that the person in charge of fleet vehicles doesn't actually HAVE a driving licence (nothing that says they have to), so unless that person gives the actual driver details they may very well get them.

Without a licence DVLA then create a "ghost" licence to fix the points to, but it doesn't actually exist, and it's rare to get banned on a ghost licence ( especially if it's only used to park points, not to allocate them for your bad driving).

The truth doesn't always make for a good headline b

Amen.

See any thread on this forum for proof.