Three of a kind (1)

I think the discovery that shocked me most when I first began to sit as a magistrate was the sheer number of people driving without insurance. Naively, I had always assumed that drivers insured their vehicles. I was wrong. Not only that, but the majority of uninsured drivers had no valid MOT and had never bothered to get a licence. The traffic court list usually contained about twenty such drivers per sitting. And most of them had previous convictions for the same offences.
Nothing has changed in that respect. Fourteen years later, I see the same numbers of the same offences whenever I sit in the traffic court. What has changed though is the fine we levy. In 1993 the standard fine for a first offence of no insurance was £540 set on the principle that it should be more expensive to be caught without insurance than it was to buy insurance. Somewhere along the line though a politically inspired change took place in the way we were instructed to calculate fines. It had to be related to the offender's financial means. Then the government decided that fixed penalties could be used for first offences of no insurance and the fixed penalty was set at £200. So we were instructed to impose the same figure if the case came to court (though we don't fine speeding cases that come to court this way). Result: Whereas the value of my house now stands at 410% of its 1993 value, a no insurance fine has fallen by 63% even without allowing for inflation. Little wonder that we are making no headway in deterring these offences.
I'll come to the matter of no licence in my next post.