Category Archives: Roads Policing

Surge in Driving Fines

Posted on by
1

The London Evening Standard have reported that there has been a big surge in driving fines fuelled by the increase in Low Traffic Neighbourhoods (LTNs). Some 7.4 million PCNs were issued in London last year – an increase of 41% on the prior year.

There are only 2.6 million cars registered in London so you can see that the number of PCNs issued per vehicle is very high even allowing for some PCNs being issued to drivers from outside the London area. These enormous numbers of PCNs are of course now being caused by the desire of some local councils to raise money from fines by installing camera systems to monitor LTNs and School Streets.

Boroughs such as Islington, Hackney and Lambeth are the leaders in this unethical practice but Transport for London (TfL) themselves issued 329,000 fines for infringement of bus lanes, yellow box junctions and other moving traffic offences.

The Covid epidemic was used as an excuse to implement LTNs without prior public consultation as temporary measures but have been made permanent as councils realised how much money they could extract from motorists using camera systems.

Standard report: https://www.standard.co.uk/news/transport/driving-parking-tickets-penalty-fines-increase-low-traffic-zones-ltn-b1032725.html

You can “follow” this blog by entering your email address in the box below.  You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.

Queen’s Speech

Posted on by
Reply

The Queen’s Speech in Parliament yesterday (10/05/2022) outlined the Government’s legislative programme. One item of interest for road users was the inclusion of a Public Order Bill to give the police new powers to tackle disruptive demonstrations.

It is likely to mean that “locking on” or gluing oneself to objects will become a specific criminal offence, as will Interfering with key national infrastructure. Police may gain greater powers to stop and search, in a bid to prevent disruptive protests. “Protest Asbos,” or “serious disruption prevention orders” will also become part of the Public Order Bill – imposing conditions on repeat offenders. Penalties for obstructive behaviour will increase also to deter those who repeatedly offend and who frequently take little notice of the current fines imposed.

These proposals brought the predictable complaints from groups such as Extinction Rebellion.

Comment: This legislation is long overdue. Peaceful protest to bring issues to the attention of the public should be protected. But behaviour that disrupts people’s lives, incurs large costs in transport delays and policing needs should not be accepted.

Let us hope that this legislation gets through Parliament quickly and is not diluted by obstructive behaviour in the House of Lords.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Drivers_London

You can “follow” this blog by entering your email address in the box below.  You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act is Now Law

Posted on by
Reply

The Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts (PCSC) Act is now law as it has received Royal Assent. This Act includes the strengthening of police powers to tackle non-violent protests that have a significant disruptive effect on the public or on access to Parliament. For example demonstrations by such groups as Extinction Rebellion have closed roads, delayed emergency services and incurred millions of pounds in costs to the police. They have also been exceedingly noisy in some cases thus creating disruption and annoyance over a wide area.

The new Act does not stop peaceful demonstrations but it will hamper the activities of extremist organisations who wish to grab attention to their cause by creating disruption. It is surely therefore a positive move to clarify and reinforce the law in this area.

There are many aspects of criminal law tidied up in this Act but one negative aspect is Clause 67 of the Bill which provides a statutory footing for the charging of fees for courses offered as an alternative to prosecution for fixed penalty offences. It gives the police discretion to offer an educational course to a motorist who has committed a low-level driving offence. This is as an alternative to a fixed penalty or prosecution and avoids liability to a criminal conviction, penalty points and higher fine.

As we have pointed out this for the first time makes it legal for the police to solicit a payment to waive prosecution and can be used by the police to raise funds – for example to generate more offences by financing more speed cameras. See https://www.freedomfordrivers.org/speed-awareness-courses for more information.

The new Act also increases the maximum sentence for the offences of causing death by dangerous driving and causing death by careless driving when under the influence of drink or drugs to a life sentence. There is also the creation of a new offence of causing serious injury by careless, or inconsiderate, driving. The offence is committed if a person causes serious injury by driving a car or other mechanically propelled vehicle on a road or other public place without due care and attention or without reasonable consideration for other road users. But the drafting is ambiguous. What is meant by “serious injury” and it could mean that a simple driving error can result in someone being sentenced to a custodial sentence.

These changes are unprincipled in nature and should not have been made.

Government explanation of the Act: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/police-crime-sentencing-and-courts-bill-2021-factsheets/police-crime-sentencing-and-courts-bill-2021-protest-powers-factsheet

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Drivers_London

You can “follow” this blog by entering your email address in the box below.  You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.

How to Stop the Protestors on the M25

Posted on by
Reply

This morning (20/09/2021) the M25 was again disrupted by eco fanatic protestors. The Home Secretary Priti Patel has ordered the police to get tougher but there is not much sign of that happening except that they do seem to be moving quickly to remove the demonstrators.

But they could do a lot more. The Daily Mail covered some of the possibilities in an article which you can read in the link below.

Daily Mail article: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10004241/Son-reveals-mum-left-paralysed-getting-stuck-SIX-HOURS-M25-eco-mob.html

It suggests that “senior officers from Hertfordshire, Surrey, Kent, Essex and the Met are considering charging the activists with more serious crimes to ensure they are deterred from further protests.  Conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, which carries a maximum penalty of five years in prison, is thought to be one of the punishments considered”.

So far although the protestors have been removed, they have not been remanded in custody or even charged, i.e. they have not appeared in court. So they can effectively carry on regardless.

Their activity is a danger to life as was covered in another part of the Mail article where they reported on a person probably having a stroke being held in the jams for several hours. A stroke or similar medical incident needs medical attention in minutes not hours if long-term effects or death are to be avoided.

London Police Commissioner Cressida Dick has led the weak response to demonstrators in London and now it has spread wider. She should never have been appointed to the post after her involvement in the death of Jean Charles de Menezes – an innocent person shot by the police in 2005. Cressida Dick has recently been reappointed to her post thus extending her job for another two years.

The Home Secretary needs to consider some emergency legislation to stop these demonstrations, particularly the closures of the major road network such as all motorways. That has now become essential.

Roger Lawson

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Drivers_London

You can “follow” this blog by clicking on the bottom right in most browsers or by using the Contact page to send us a message requesting. You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.

Speed Awareness Courses to be Made Legal?

Posted on by
Reply

One of the aspects of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (see Reference 1 below) that is currently going through Parliament and which has largely gone unreported is Section 67 which covers education courses as an alternative to prosecution for motoring offences.

We have pointed out previously that the offer of speed awareness courses was likely to be illegal. It’s a perversion of justice to waive prosecution on payment of a sum of money, and there is no evidence that attending such a course has any impact on road safety. See Reference 2 below for a web site that gives a full explanation.

The new Bill does at least bring the use of such courses into law and allows the Secretary of State to regulate them. However it permits the police to set a fee that is higher than the cost of providing the course. Any such excess must be used for the purpose of promoting road safety, but that does include the provision of more speed cameras and police to operate them. So the gravy train of the industry of speed enforcement will continue, if not expand even further.

In conclusion, this will remain a dubious practice, with money driving the schemes not road safety.

Roger Lawson

Reference 1: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/2839

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Drivers_London

You can “follow” this blog by clicking on the bottom right in most browsers or by using the Contact page (see under the About tab) to send us a message requesting. You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.

Active Travel and Road Safety – The Facts

Posted on by
Reply

There has been a big push to encourage people to take up “active travel” in the last few years, i.e. to cycle or walk on the premise that this will improve their health. It is hoped that this will relieve pressure on public transport and reduce traffic congestion by getting people out of their cars. So the Mayor of London’s Transport Strategy that he adopted focussed on this well before the latest attempts to encourage active travel in response to the Covid-19 epidemic.

How successful has this strategy been and what are the unintended consequences?

The latest figures available from the Department for Transport (DfT) in their National Travel Survey for 2019 showed no change in the number of stages cycled and an actual fall in the average distance cycled from 58 to 54 miles. The number of stages walked also fell from 347 in 2018 to 332. Cycling remained very much a male dominated travel mode – they made 3 times as many cycle trips as women.

There was little change in the road casualty statistics in 2019. The number of people killed was 1,748. Despite sharp falls in the number prior to 2010, the figures plateaued in the 2010s. The DfT suggests that any changes in recent years are simply random variations (only 2% down in 2019). There has of course been some increase in traffic volumes in the last few years but the results are still very disappointing.

Although overall casualty figures fell by 5% in 2019, this data is probably an under-estimate as it is known that slight casualties are under-reported and recent pressures on police resources mean even fewer are reported with police forces not even turning out to attend many road traffic accidents.

We have been claiming for some time that the failure to bring down casualties is due to defects in road safety policies. For example a concentration on automated speed enforcement rather than spending money on road engineering and education. The encouragement of cycling may not have helped either. These are the relative figures for fatalities per billion miles travelled using different transport modes:

Motorcycling: 113.3

Walking: 34.1

Cycling: 29.4

Car use: 1.8

HGV use: 0.9

Bus use: 0.6

Van use: 0.6

A new negative trend may soon appear if E-Scooters are widely adopted as they appear to be positively dangerous. The Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety (PACTS) recently said this: “From evidence and experience around the world, it is now very clear that the public benefits of [e-scooters] are illusory and the disbenefits substantial, at least in a European context”. They oppose the current trials and wider legislation to support them. Very few car trips apparently transfer to e-scooter use and they also are not “active travel”.

They are also a particular danger to pedestrians when ridden on the pavement which is happening all over London at present with the police doing very little to stop it.

What have been the changes in transport modes prompted by the Covid-19 epidemic?  They have been substantial, particularly in London. Underground and London bus usage has fallen greatly as more people worked from home which is why the Mayor and TfL have financial difficulties as income has fallen while the network has not been reduced. Nationwide cycling rose by as much as 300% on some days in the first couple of months (April/May) over the start of the year. The weather does of course have a big impact on cycle use which has been relatively benign in recent months and summer makes cycling more enjoyable. Cycle use rises sharply during weekends and bank holidays which suggests it is dominated by “leisure” and “exercise” use, particularly as gyms and sports venues have been closed. But the cycling numbers are now reverting to more normal levels. You can see the data for different modes during the epidemic here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/transport-use-during-the-coronavirus-covid-19-pandemic   

Car use fell very substantially during the first few weeks of the epidemic but that has also reverted to near normal levels across the country. Any big increases in traffic congestion in London are surely due to the road closures and removal of road space by cycle and bus lanes using Covid-19 as an excuse.

Comment: The fear of gridlock on the roads as people avoided public transport is not born out by the facts. They have mainly avoided travelling altogether. As people have learned to work from home, it is clear that the demand for central London offices will fall, and the number of commuters may never recover to previous levels. Why should TfL maintain a network of bus and underground services at previous levels when the passengers are much reduced? Any commercial business would cut services to match demand because to do otherwise leads to bankruptcy. That is what will happen to London’s transport services unless the Government bows to Sadiq Khan’s demands for more cash to keep it afloat. The Government should ignore such requests and force TfL to adapt to the new world rather than waste the taxes we all pay.  

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Drivers_London

You can “follow” this blog by clicking on the bottom right in most browsers or by using the Contact page (see under the About tab) to send us a message requesting. You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.

Road Policing and Making Money from Speeding

Posted on by
Reply

A very interesting report has recently been published by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) under the title “Roads Policing: Not Optional”. It has some particularly interesting things to say about the use of speed cameras but is generally critical about the fall in attention to roads policing. Staff and other resources have been reduced over the last few years, with automated enforcement of speeding offences when all the other dangerous driving activities are ignored.

The chart below from the report shows how road fatalities in the UK have plateaued in the last ten years:

The report states bluntly that “Roads policing in some forces is inadequate”. It is clear that many police forces do not consider roads policing a priority. Fatal and serious injury road accidents where illegal speed is a factor (above the speed limit) also frequently feature a cocktail of drugs, alcohol and crime and hence are not amenable to automated enforcement. We have long argued for more police officers to be deployed on our roads. Instead expenditure on roads policing has been cut and ever more emphasis is placed on speed enforcement when that is a factor in relatively few road casualty accidents.

The HMICFRS Report is particularly interesting on pages 28 to 30 where it discusses the financial arrangements associated with police speed camera operations. For example it says: “Crucially, what constitutes recovery of costs is open to interpretation”. That hints, and quite correctly, that police forces are generating profits that are used on anything they choose as we have previously claimed (see https://www.freedomfordrivers.org/speed-awareness-courses.htm for details of the evidence). The report also suggests that police forces and local safety partnerships should publish on an annual basis the details of revenue and on what that revenue is spent.

The report also notes this: “This apparent unwillingness to support education over enforcement had led to suspicion among officers, including some at chief officer level, that the focus of activity was intended to increase revenue for the safety partnership. In support of this, they gave examples of some camera sites that they believed didn’t have a history of collisions or other identified vulnerabilities”. And “Elsewhere, we were told that the reason enforcement took place at certain locations was that they were ‘good hunting grounds’, rather than because they had a history of collisions”.

The report suggests that guidelines over how and where cameras are located should be refreshed. But the problem will remain that where there is a financial incentive, the abuse will continue as police forces continue to be short of money.

It is just too much of a temptation to concentrate on speed enforcement rather than focus on the road safety issues that might reduce deaths and injuries.

The whole system needs to be reformed to stop the abuses that cause millions of drivers to pay money to the police and the course operators for “education” which has not been shown to have any road safety benefit whatsoever.

The HMICFRS Report is available from here: https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/publications/not-optional-an-inspection-of-roads-policing-in-england-and-wales/

Roger Lawson

(Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmpowABD )

You can “follow” this blog by clicking on the bottom right in most browsers or by using this Contact page: https://www.speed-awareness.org/contactus.html     to send us a message requesting. You will then receive an email alerting you to new posts as they are added.