Driving Without Insurance

Without Insurance Driving Offences

 

Driving on a road or in a public place without having at least third party insurance is an offence and is illegal.

Regardless of whether the vehicle itself is insured, if you as the driver are not adequately covered  to drive it you can be prosecuted.

Legal penalties for driving without insurance:

If you’re caught driving a vehicle you’re not insured to drive, the police could give you a fixed penalty of £200 and 6 penalty points.

If you go to court you can get:

• A fine of up to £5000 +
• six to eight penalty points  on your licence or a discretionary ban of up to 56 days
• For new drivers (less than 2 years) your licence will be revoked (unless you can use a Special Reasons Argument) & additionally you will have to resit your driving test. Retaking your test is an expensive punishment. You may also need extra lessons before you felt comfortable putting in for it again

The police also have the power to seize, and in some cases, destroy the vehicle that’s being driven uninsured.

Driving uninsured is considered very serious by Magistrates due to the potential implications were you to have an accident while uninsured.

To be found legally guilty of driving uninsured the Prosecution in court must prove that you were driving a vehicle on a road (or in a public place) at the time of the  offence.  This is documentary offence, so the burden of proof passes to you as the Defendant to supply evidence to prove that you were properly insured at the time.

It is nearly impossible for the prosecution to prove that you were uninsured because they would need to contact every single insurance company in the UK in order to try and establish if there was an insurance certificate in place.

More Information

Your magistrates court will however, establish reasonable grounds if you have in some way been misled into believing that at the time you were insured or come to that, that at the time there wasn’t any way for you to know that you didn’t have insurance. An example of this is where a parent has told their child that they have insured them on a vehicle, but the parent had in fact made an error and the child wasn’t properly insured.

The fine associated with no insurance offences can vary a lot depending on your circumstances. To find out the maximum fine for driving without insurance – visit Patterson Law and submit your offence details into their sentence calculator.

The courts (and magistrates), perhaps being parents themselves, quite often have sympathy in cases like this and usually rule that the child’s belief was in fact reasonable.

 

Is it an offence if I was driving a friend’s vehicle & I believed that my comprehensive insurance policy legally covered me to drive other cars with the owners permission?

Before driving any vehicle it is the responsibility of the driver to make sure that they have suitable insurance cover in place. The registered vehicle owner is guilty of permitting the use of the vehicle without insurance cover. Many fully comprehensive policies no longer cover use of any vehicle, so a driver needs to check their specific policy prior to using any other car or vehicle.