Stockport Insurance Broker and preferred business partner to The Road Haulage Association (RHA) for provision of insurance to RHA Members is warning drivers of new measures introduced to tackle careless driving.
Bus, truck and van drivers face stiffer fines for existing offences and new on-the-spot penalties in a package of measures unveiled by the Department for Transport yesterday.
From July police will be given new
powers to impose fixed penalty
notices of up to £100 for careless
driving offences such as hogging the
middle lane of motorways and
tailgating.
There is no indication of whether
close-running trucks or buses would
be targeted with the new measures.
Even so, graduated fixed penalties for
drivers’ hours and overloading
offences for truck and bus drivers also
increase.
They rise from £30 to £50, £60 to
£100, £120 to £200 and £200 to £300,
but penalty point levels remain
unchanged.
Left: Hogging the middle lane can
result in an on-the-spot fine
Road Safety Minister Stephen Hammond said:
“Careless drivers are a menace and their negligence puts innocent people’s lives at risk. That is why we are making it easier for the police to tackle problem drivers by allowing them to immediately issue a fixed penalty notice rather than needing to take every offender to court.
“We are also increasing penalties for a range of driving offences to a level which reflects their seriousness and which will ensure that they are consistent with other similar penalty offences.”
The main goal of the proposals is to give police greater freedom to penalise poor driving amongst the driving population without burdening the courts with lesser offences.
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