KNOW YOUR RIGHTS THE LAW
99 times out of 100 the court would be correct. Insurance is usually very black and white, so if you have insurance, you are not guilty and if you don’t have insurance, you are guilty.
However, this was the one time in 100 where the circumstances are different. There is a very specific defence to protect employees in this scenario. The law says that if a person can show that:
(a) the vehicle did not belong to them;
driver obtains a provisional licence, it does not override their international licence and they will still have an entitlement to drive on that international licence. There is a case confirming this: Heidak v Winnett.
And of course, because he had the correct licence, it further meant that his insurance was not invalidated.
THE OUTCOME
We attended court with him, we made submissions to the prosecutor on this basis and the prosecution agreed to withdraw all charges against him.
CASE 3
Mr C was stopped by police as his vehicle was showing as being uninsured. He worked for a company and it was a company vehicle. When he was pulled over, he specifically told the police officers that he had no idea he that he wasn’t insured because he’d been given the car by his company and they sorted out the insurance.
Despite not being his fault, the police charged him with driving without insurance and offered him a fixed penalty of 6 points and a £300 fine. He rejected that offer because he wanted to argue his case in court.
He attended a court hearing having entered a plea of not guilty. But when he turned up, he was told that because there was no insurance policy on the vehicle, he would have no choice but to plead guilty. He was told if he didn’t, the costs would be substantially higher. He then pleaded guilty and was given 6 penalty points with over £1,000 in fines and costs.
He instructed us to see if there was anything that could be done about it.
PHTM NOVEMBER 2024
Although Mr C clearly had a defence, it was complicated by the fact that he had pleaded guilty. When you plead guilty, it is not easy to remove that plea. We had to appeal to the Crown Court and have a separate inquiry with a Crown Court Judge to confirm whether his guilty plea was equivocal (incorrect).
After two hearings at the Crown Court, the Judge agreed that the plea was incorrect, and the case was remitted back to the Magistrates’ Court for a trial.
We then attended the trial with him, and we proved that the vehicle did not belong to him by getting a copy of the logbook, that he was driving during the course of his employment by getting a copy of his work rota and that he didn’t know that he wasn’t insured by putting forward a number of documents to prove that it was the duty of his employers to insure the vehicle, so was their mistake and not his.
Based on that, he was found not guilty and all points/fines were removed.
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(b) that they were diving in the course of their employment; and
(c) that they did not know nor suspect that there was no insurance on the vehicle
then they are not guilty of the offence. Mr C could have argued all three.
THE OUTCOME
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