Road Safety Bill [HL]

We are entering into other areas of law, but the noble Lord will recognise that of course we have defences against a situation where somebody commits an offence of even greater severity than the one we are describing—six points—and the corporation says, ““well we own the car, but we haven’t the faintest who the driver was””. For all sorts of reasons that would not be an acceptable position and corporations are expected to know who their drivers are and are likely to find themselves in difficulty if they maintain that they happen to employ 5,000 drivers and have little idea who is driving a vehicle they own. That clearly is not a situation that obtains in this country at the present time. No self-respecting organisation would dream of finding itself in that position and we have all sorts of ways of ensuring that that is so. We are dealing here with the penalty points sent to the owner of the vehicle. It is quite clear that at the present time that person has the perverse incentive to get away with three points, when it is clear that the penalty for failing to provide the information must be consistent with the penalty that would have been incurred if the person had been identified.