Does lax sentencing foster the growth of an uninsured driver 'underclass'?As far as alarming statistics go, I think the widely-reported fact that you're never more than 14 metres from a rat is pretty hard to beat. However, the spread of rats doesn't cost me an extra £30 a year on my car insurance premium. The spread of uninsured drivers, on the other hand, does. And the alarming statistic to go with that? According to the Department for Transport (DfT), one in every twenty UK drivers is uninsured. That means that in heavy traffic on a three lane motorway, you're never more than about 20 metres from an uninsured driver. I worked that one out using trigonometry. As for supplementary alarming statistics? Well, the rats put up a pretty good fight. The average rat can kill a human in 35 different ways - everything from carrying deadly diseases to chewing through electrical cables, to outright bodily attack. They cause a quarter of all urban fires. But next to the 1.5 million drivers on our roads without motor insurance, Britain's wild rat population seems a bit, well, tame. According to the Association of British Insurers (ABI), uninsured motorists are ten times more likely to have drink driving convictions than those of us with valid car insurance policies, and six times more likely to be driving an unroadworthy vehicle.
It seems that once they've broken one law - be it drink driving, uninsured driving, failure to pay road tax or any other - some motorists just give up trying to be legal altogether. They become what financial website http://www.thisismoney.co.uk has termed the 'car underclass', a hardcore of offenders who flout the law whenever they get behind the wheel.
Read a newspaper and you'll notice that many of the worst reported accidents on UK roads are caused by repeat offenders. Habitual drink drivers or joyriders are behind many thousands of injuries and deaths (not least of which their own) and cost the survivors dear in terms of excess payments and unprovable damages. However, you don't have to be hit by one of the underclass to be 'hit' by them financially. For the starters, there's that £30 added to your cheap car insurance policy. £30 is the amount it costs each legally-insured driver to fund the giant £500 million spent every year by the Motor Insurer's Bureau (MIB). This government-founded organisation is there to compensate the victims of uninsured drivers - though, as you can see, it's the rest of us who pick up the tab. Yet outrageously, many uninsured drivers who are arrested and sent to court walk out with fines totalling less than the price of even the cheapest car insurance premium. This, in a nutshell, is the reason behind the rise of a car underclass: it's cheaper to get caught driving illegally than it is to pay to drive legally. Besides the relatively affordable fines, sentencing for this kind of lawbreaking usually runs to a driving ban of between two and five years, a suspended prison sentence and points on your driver's licence. If you don't mind breaking the law and are willing to gamble on not getting caught again, you're essentially free to drive. It's hard to say whether simply toughening-up sentencing for would do much to lower the numbers of uninsured on UK roads, but something surely needs to be done - before the rats and illegal drivers end up fighting with each other for space.
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