The Government and various motoring bodies have been looking more and more closely at the issue of uninsured driving over the last ten years in order to comply with the 4th EU motoring directive. Now, the Government is planning on introducing “Continuous Insurance Enforcement”.
What exactly is the 4th directive?
The EU has brought in this piece of legislation, to help citizens from different member states, identify and trace an insurer on a vehicle from another country. For what purpose? Because there are over 500,000 accidents between people of varying nationalities every year and previously, sorting this out was a bit of a headache. Dealing with the issues of multiple legal systems and different languages, never mind the problems of drivers disappearing back to their country of origin, sorting out a claim could be a lengthy, bewildering and often expensive business with perhaps little chance of success, which makes a mockery of having car insurance in the first place.
What is the result of this?
Every country has their own register of insurance policy details for all the vehicles on their roads. In the UK, this is known as the Motor Insurers Database (or MID for short). As strong links have been made between the use of uninsured vehicles and organised crime, the UK Government have been very happy to comply with the 4th directive, as it falls in line with government policy on reducing crime and the number of uninsured drivers on the road in the UK.
There are some drawbacks, as no system is perfect, and sometimes human error can lead to inconsistencies on the MID that can result in the inconvenience of being collared by the Police who will request insurance documents. If non is forthcoming and it is out of office hours, that can be a problem for the driver, in that their car could be confiscated. Until recently, “blanket” policies were not registered on the database either, it was purely private cars, so those driving on business car insurance or fleet insurance policies could have had problems.
Continuous Enforcement
The Police are constantly finding new and innovative ways of enforcement, such as automatic number plate recognition cameras, although outside major roads and urban areas, this technology is still not very prevalent due to it’s expense. Currently, to stop someone driving without insurance you had to catch them doing it, but wouldn’t it be better to prevent this in the first place? Now there are plans to bring in new legislation at the start of 2011, to make it an offence to KEEP a vehicle without proper motor insurance, let alone drive one without it. This can be achieved by combining the information from the MID and the DVLA’s records of all vehicles registered for the road, meaning that unless a car is declared off road, the owner must insure it, or face a penalty or even prosecution unless they do one or the other.
More details of this are available at direct.gov.uk/stayinsured
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