Fixing the scourge of Uninsured Drivers
A proposal for harm reduction on the road
What do we need to fix?
Uninsured drivers are more dangerous than insured drivers and are involved in more road traffic collisons, with around 1700 deaths being recorded on UK roads every year.
Current estimates put the number of uninsured vehicles on UK roads at around 1 million.
The cost of the damage caused by these collisions has a dramatic impact on the people involved, the emergency services, courts, and NHS, and are estimated to be £1.8 billion per year.
Where we are now?
Current legislation demands that any motor vehicle must have the following before being used on public roads; MOT, Road Tax and Insurance. Any driver must also have a valid Driving Licence. 3 of these 4 criteria are easy to check online using DVLA and MID, but the resources available to enforce these requirements in the real world are very limited.
This means that is trivially easy to drive a motor vehicle illegally with none of the 4 criteria being met. Combining this with a lack of policing resources mean that the chances of being caught driving illegally is very low.
How do we fix this?
Check before Fuel.
Imagine a world where the legal status of a vehicle was checked by a petrol station before it allowed the driver to fill up?
No MOT, Tax or Insurance = No Fuel
A large proportion of Petrol Stations already use CCTV cameras to record vehicles on their premises to help protect themselves against “drive offs”. Imagine if those cameras could be used to protect society against the scourge of Uninsured Drivers, rather than just protecting the revenue of the Petrol Station?
Assuming an average car visits a Petrol Station every 2 weeks, and there are around 1 million Uninsured Drivers in the UK currently, this would provide 25 million annual opportunities to prevent an Uninsured Vehicle being driven on the road.
What are the benefits?
Reducing the amount of uninsured drivers would reduce road traffic collisions meaning fewer deaths and serious injuries.
The time and resources of the Emergency Services would be freed up to deal with other incidents.
Revenue for Insurance Companies may increase as people who need to drive, realise that driving whilst uninsured is a lot more difficult.
What are the problems with this approach?
Whilst Oil companies like BP and Shell mesure their profits in billions, the profit margin on the retail sale of fuel is small. So Fuel Retailers would likely rail against a law which imposed further costs on them.
Making uninsured driving more difficult could lead to an increase in “car cloning” as criminals look at other ways to stay on the road illegally.
There may be a privacy concern about any increase in the monitoring of vehicle movements.
You could argue that Fuel Retailers have a moral duty to not enable criminal behaviour by preventing uninsured cars to be filled up. The 7 biggest fuel retailers control over 80% of the market between them.
A financial incentive to encourage compliance from Fuel Retailers would have a positive impact, and allow them to project a positive, pro society image that they currently don’t have. Implementing a voluntary code could also potentially be quicker and at least as effective as passing new legislation.
At the time of writing UK Fuel duty is 57.95p per litre. The average profit per litre for the retailer is around 5p per litre. Reducing the fuel duty by 0.95p per litre would give the retailer a potential profit increase of nearly 20% if they chose not to pass this reduction on to their customers. This net benefit would easily pay for the capital and running costs of a Check before Fuel system.
Whilst this change would slightly reduce the total Fuel Duty collected by government, currently around £27 billion per annum, would the benefit to society outweigh this loss of income?
Links
Check your own vehicles’ insurance on MID https://ownvehicle.askmid.com/#
Check any vehicles Tax and MOT https://vehicleenquiry.service.gov.uk/
Esso
customer.care@exxonmobil.com
BP
careline@bp.com
Shell
generalpublicenquiries-uk@shell.com
Esso Nisa
mail@greenergy.com
Tesco
customer.services@tesco.com
Morissons, Asda and Sainsburys; contact via form on respective website.
Header Photo by Zakaria Zayane on Unsplash
Fixing the Scourge 