DVLA red tape leaves Life On Cars at the mercy of the French police

IS IT possible to break the law in order to avoid not breaking it?

That’s the rather perplexing scenario I’ve spent the past week pondering, after it transpired that in order to not flout this country’s laws I run the risk of simultaneously falling foul of another’s.

All this thanks to the DVLA, some red tape, a J-registered Saab and the Belgians. 

It all started a week or so ago when the state agency responsible for driving licences sent me a polite letter to remind me that the photo on mine was looking a little out of date, having been taken in a branch of Woolworths at a time when Britain’s two main talking points were the Iraq War and The Cheeky Girls. 

For the sake of £20, a new and equally embarrassing photo and filling out a form, I’d avoid getting a £1,000 fine. There was only one snag; it was a legal requirement to send off both parts of my driving licence with it. 

After a few minutes of moaning to anyone who’d care to listen, I duly obliged.

It’s an inconvenience, but the not the end of the world. Or at least it wasn’t until two days after posting the form off, when I got asked, for a business trip, to go to Belgium.

A business trip which is not only in the very near future but will involve co-driving a friend’s Saab 9000 across France on the long trip to Antwerp. Places which, should I get stopped by les Gendarmes, I’ll almost certainly get asked to produce the driving licence I no longer possess.

It’s an absurd state of affairs. In order to avoid breaking the laws of this country, I’ve been forced into a position where I’ll have to break the laws of at least one other country should I dare to do what I’m legally entitled to on the other side of the Channel.

A quick call to the DVLA didn’t help. Partly because it wasn’t an especially quick call and led me to believe that humankind has actually abandoned Swansea and left the agency’s phone-manning robots to fend for themselves, but because once I actually got past the computerized phone switchboard it turned out the poor girl at the other end of the line didn’t actually know how to help me.

Having explained that “Have you asked the authorities in France and Belgium?” wasn’t the answer I was looking for, she was happy to sell me a Certificate of Entitlement, which for a fiver will prove to the police you really are entitled to drive. Unfortunately, it also comes with a whopping great disclaimer which states it isn’t valid in other EU states.

It is ridiculous that, in the event of the DVLA requiring your licence back at renewal time, it has absolutely no procedure in place should you need to pop over to the continent.

I look forward to writing my next column from my cell in La Bastille.

Should speeding drivers be given harsher fines?

MOTORISTS who end up on the wrong side of the law could be made to pay more for their misdeeds under new proposals being considered by the Goverment.

Ministry of Justice plans currently under consultation are suggesting upping the current penalties paid by drivers for offences such as speeding from £60 to £90.

The report which suggests raising the charges, entitled Getting It Right For Victims and Witnesses, reads: “As part of its new Strategic Framework for Road Safety,21 which aims to reduce death and injuries on our roads, the Department for Transport proposes to increase the level of some Fixed Penalty Notices for traffic offences to bring them in line with other penalties which deal with low-level offending.

"Penalty levels for many offences have not increased during the last ten years. The current levels have fallen behind other fixed penalties and therefore risk trivialising the offences. The proposed increases for motoring offences include those in relation to excessive speed, control of a vehicle, mobile phone use, ignoring signals and pedestrian crossings, and failure to wear a seatbelt."

However motoring groups have hit out at the plans, with the Institute of Advanced Motorists saying its own research highlighted that more than half of all drivers disagreed with the idea.

IAM chief executive Simon Best said: "While funding victims of crime is laudable, the real aim of fines for motoring offences should be deterrence. We want to stop people breaking the law.

“Having an income that relies on dangerous driving won’t help reduce crashes. There is a strong case for this money to be spent on road safety.”

The consultation on the proposals, which can be seen in full on the Ministry of Justice website, closes on April 22.

Why using ANPR to catch out insurance cheats at petrol stations will never work

CONFESSION time, then, chaps and chapettes. Who out of this week's readers is driving around without their car insurance being up to scratch?

Apparently, just under 10% of the region's motorists are driving around without bothering with the pesky business of paying for cover, which means statistically at least one of you hasn't gone got any. After all, insurance is unbelievably expensive these days. It's also almost completely unfathomable and sold to you by an opera tenor who unites people from all walks of life because they all, without exception, would love nothing more than to have him removed from our TV screens for good.

Car insurance is confusing and expensive and as a result loads of you just can't be bothered with it. Even the Government, as I've mentioned previously, realise it.

Yet Whitehall's latest idea to crack down on the uninsured drivers - which I'm absolutely not one of, by the way - isn't going to work because while it's good in principle, it's got more holes than one of Jamie Oliver's colanders. As a bit of a self-confessed Dragons' Den addict, I just know that if it was some young business boffin's invention it'd be shot to pieces with just a handful of snide remarks from Duncan Bannatyne and a bad joke from Peter Jones. However, it's the Government who are suggesting it, so I will at least try to take it seriously.

In essence, they're on about fitting ANPR cameras, which can recognise car numberplates, to every petrol station in the country in a bid to spot uninsured cars as they pull in to fill up. The technology, which already works a treat on police cars, will then automatically tell the petrol pumps not to give the offending driver any fuel. And presumably give Plod a bell at the same time.

It's a great idea in principle but - Bannatyne mode activated - it will be horrendously expensive in practice, and it'd have to fitted to each and every one of Britain's 8,000 or so filling stations across the land. It'd also encourage even more crooks to clone car numberplates, siphoning would shoot up, and I can just see the court case where the one law-abiding driver, who the cameras clock by mistake, successfully sues for defamation after the system insinuates he's an insurance cheat.

It is, for all those reasons and a couple of others I can't squeeze into one Life On Cars column, a badly-thought out waste of what is basically YOUR money.

I'm out.