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Police alert to ‘£200-a-time’ trade in - February 4, 2012
(Source: Law | The Times)
The prevalence of speed cameras has fuelled a trade in people paying others to take their penalty points, a specialist road traffic lawyer has said.
Chris Huhne, who resigned as Energy Secretary yesterday, emphatically denies such a charge and has vowed to clear his name. But his case aside, the practice is on the increase, according to Chris Sweetman, who runs his own niche firm, Sweetmans, from London and Cheshire.
He told The Times: “There has been a big rise in this crime and it is related to the increase in the numbers of speeding cameras. It is incredibly common.
“When people have nine points on their licence and they get caught by a camera, they will frequently try to nominate someone else as the driver of the vehicle. That person will do it and often for a fee — say £200.” Police forces had specific investigative teams within their central ticket bureaux who would watch out for this, he added.
Mr Sweetman, whose firm defends motorists on a wide range of traffic offences, said that the type of behaviour to arouse suspicion in police would include a person nominating someone who had been in Britain on holiday and returned abroad as the driver. Another ploy might be to nominate someone who had a clean licence. “If this is done by someone with nine points then, obviously, that raises suspicion,” he said. “Or it might be that it is the person’s car but they say that on that particular morning it was their son, aged 17, who was driving it — even though it was on the way to work.”
In these circumstances, police would prosecute and the courts almost always impose a jail term of six months “to send out a deterrent”. In the case of a high-profile person the message would be even more powerful, he added.
Mr Sweetman said that cameras could not always show whether the driver was male or female. “The job of the camera is not to identify the driver — it is simply to capture the speeding offence and the registration.”
If the camera was of the type that photographed the front of the vehicle, it might also show the gender of the driver, he added. But one that shot the vehicle from the rear made it impossible, perhaps because of headrests, to discern the driver’s identity.
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