catching up with drivers who commit offences abroad
We are in the middle of the holiday season and
no doubt many of us are looking forward to spending a couple of
weeks abroad, perhaps in Spain or on a Greek Island. It is
quite normal to want to explore the resort and its surrounding
areas and hire a car or a bike. For others, their holiday
experience will involve packing up the car/caravan and driving
through parts of Continental Europe. What happens though, if you
commit a driving offence whilst abroad? Are the
police really going to bother?
Well, you might conclude that the likelihood
of you being prosecuted is the same as that of an overseas driver
being prosecuted here, if they did something wrong.
The truth is that the more grave the offence
committed, the more likely it is that the police abroad will be
determined to prosecute you. The European Commission is going
to take steps to make this much more likely. It recognises
that there are four big killers that cause 75% of road
fatalities:
One way of making it easier for the police
abroad to do this is to simplify for them how to identify the
driver. If the vehicle is stopped by the police at the time,
then the driver can obviously be identified. Where a vehicle does
not stop at the time, then the solution is to check with the hire
car company if the vehicle was hired. However, where it is
your vehicle and obviously UK registered, that is a problem.
At the moment, the police in say Germany, Spain or Italy
would have to request information from DVLC's database and would
not have automatic access to it.
The European Commission is therefore seeking
to implement a shared electronic database for member states to
access each others' registration data in order to ensure the
potential for prosecution as a valid deterrent.
European Commission
Vice-President Siim Kallas, responsible for transport underlined
the need for an EU wide agreement saying: "A foreign driver is three times more likely to commit an
offence than a resident driver. Many people seem to think
that when they go abroad the rules no longer apply to them.
My message is that they do apply and now we are going to
apply them."
It would have to implement this by way of an
EU Directive, which if passed, would require the UK to bring in
legislation freeing up access to DVLC's records within two years.
However, it is not intended to harmonise driving records,
offences or penalties and so a conviction in Holland for, say,
speeding, would not mean you would get points on
your UK licence.
There are clearly some strong public interest
grounds for being able to trace and prosecute offending drivers
across the EU. However, there are also risks associated with
freeing up access to DVLC's database and access to this information
is currently protected by robust legislation in the form of the
Data Protection Act 1998 and enforced by the Information
Commissioner. The worry is that data could get into the hands
of organised criminals and critics would need to be convinced that
sufficient protections were put in place.
