Racking up 30 points on your licence need not interfere with your driving pleasure and convenience, it seems, after pet foods to driving instruction giant IAMs warned BBC News this week that an unknown man from Brighouse is still driving around after accruing precisely that number of points in the past three years.
Nor is the Brighouse man (who, we should stress, is not related in any way whatsoever to leading Brighouse-based firm Bankstone in general, nor to one of our senior executives in particular) the worst offender nationally.
That would be some bloke in Liverpool who’s racked up a mighty 45 points without being legally obliged to extricate himself from behind the wheel, closely followed by a Warrington man with 36, a lady from Lincoln with 34, and another from Hull with 31.
There are, IAMs claims, around 7,300 UK motorists with 12 or more points on their licences who have not been banned from driving. The implication is that magistrates are exercising their discretion fairly freely in refraining from banning individuals for whom such an imposition would entail ‘exceptional hardship’.
But IAMs bloke Simon Vest reckons “Any suggestion that some drivers may be able to speed with impunity and then talk themselves out of a ban puts our whole approach to enforcement into question.”
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