Admit you're guilty ... or we'll sulk

You may recall that last month I mentioned that Her Majesty's Government were considering whether or not to charge up to £4000 in costs for everyone who had the audacity to challenge their evidence in a speed camera prosecution, and in that entry I mentioned how we (as in "we" as a company) had indeed challenged a "Casualty Reduction Bureau" in the past and found their systems, and more importantly their evidence, to be shaky at best, non existant at worst - previous blog story here.

Well, I was sorting through a filing tray today and at the bottom found my correspondance with the "Casualty Reduction Bureau" (CRB) concerned and so can tell the full story, as it happened, with just two riders...

1. The above photograph is genuine and is untouched by me and my photo editing skills apart from the fact that I have obviously obliterated the number plate, that act exhausted my photo editing skills and so what you see above is exactly what I was presented by the CRB. I've also cropped the photo so as not to show the CRB's own identification codes, yes maybe I'm paranoid but I don't want the bas'tads coming looking for me again !

2. Its been three years since all of this happened and they still haven't replied to my last letter, for all I know its still sitting in some civil servants "IN" tray waiting for a decision when he/she gets back from sick leave (It'll be "stress", it always is) - so this whole post may be removed without notice - I'm being paranoid again.

So,

Weds 12th Nov 2003 I'm opening the mail and out drops a Notice of Intended Prosecution for one of our company cars, simply informing us that the CRB had photographic evidence of our vehicle doing 39mph in a 30mph limit on 3rd June 2003 and could I please dob in the driver and get him/her to cough up £60 and his/her licence.

Now this wasn't the first one of these Notices that I'd received and the location of the mobile camera in question was well known to us, I was annoyed that one of us had been stupid enough to be caught again, annoyed for all sorts of reasons not least financially annoyed, so was just about to kick someones arse when I read the date again - 3rd June, today was the 12th November.

The annoyance moved from one of our drivers to the CRB themselves and the more I thought about it the more annoyed with them I got, particularly at their arrogant wording of the Notice and its threat to prosecute me personally if I didn't tell them who the driver was on that day five months previously.

Of course they depend on the honesty of the British public in simply holding their hands up and paying the fine and taking the points on their licences, its how the whole system works, they don't show you the evidence but you have to admit to the offence anyway.

I spoke to a friend who is a criminal solicitor (always a dangerous thing to do) and he told me that the CRB had only 14 days in which to issue the notice to us - its covered in Section 1c of the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988, I looked on the internet at the act and sure enough there it was, they had to contact me within 14 days of the offence - ha ! I had the bastards, time for one of my famous kick arse letters.

I wrote back, nicely, you should always be nice, and act a little dumb, I wrote and told them that the vehicle was a company car and used as a pool car (which was true) and that one of three drivers could have been using the car on that day, and that I had a little difficulty in identifying the driver. Then in a second paragraph I happened to also mention the relevant road traffic act and the 14 day rule and how my job would have been much easier if they had sent me the forms within 14 days, whereas five months made it near to impossible.

They wrote back to me on the 17th November to tell me (quote) "...we are only obliged to send out the first Notice of Intended Prosecution to the last known owner/keeper of the vehicle..." (unquote) and also (quote) "...as you will appreciate that person or company may not be the current owner or driver at the time of the offence. Subsequently, as with this offence, further enquiries must be made which take longer than the initial 14 day period."(unquote).

They then went on to threaten me again with prosecution if I failed to ID the driver within 28 days.

That annoyed me again.

I wrote back to them on the 18th November (its always good to take 24 hours out before composing your replies to anything), very politely pointing out that the vehicle in question was a Peugeot, made in the UK and registered direct to Peugeot UK straight off the production line, and then leased by their own leasing management company to us, in other words it had only ever had one owner (Peugeot UK) and that that owner knew who we were as leassors, and that when the owner received these notices then they had a legal obligation to inform the authorities whom was operating the vehicle within 30 days, in other words I could account for the diversion of the Notice for a maximum of 30 days, but where had the other four months gone ?

I finished by apologising for my inability to ID the driver and suggested that if they had a photograph that they could show me then I would be able to quickly draw a conclusion.

They wrote back to me on 24th November and to my amazement they attached a copy of the photographic evidence that they were basing their Notice of Intended Prosecution on - its the one above - and they actually apologise for (quote) "...the poor quality but trust that you will be able to identify the identity of the driver..."(unquote).

After we had stopped laughing I got annoyed again.

I got annoyed that they had obviously made a balls up, probably lost a whole batch of digital images, but were still arrogantly pushing for a prosecution, even though they knew, and I now knew, that any half sane magistrate would kick their arses all the way down the courtroom steps with their image of The Shadow driving a car with only his knuckles visible - what a good job that none of us in the office had tatoos on our knuckles - and we all agreed to go to court and ask a magistrate to choose which one of us to prosecute.

I wrote back finally on the 9th December 2003, don't know why I left it so long this time, maybe I still didn't believe that anyone could be so stupid as to still try and leach £60 and three points out of someone on no evidence at all.

I informed them that due to the poor quality of the photgraph I was unable to identify the driver and I filled in their Notice of Intended Prosecution with the box ticked to state exactly that, the form leaves you in no doubt that you are then personally liable to prosecution and that a court must deal with the offence of "Failure to furnish driver details", I secretly looked forward to the day in court.

It never came.

They never replied to my last letter, which annoys me again.

They obviously knew all along that they had no evidence at all to go to court with and that they were also on dodgy ground with the time period given for the Notice to arrive, but still saw fit to try and extract a self-confession - its what happens when you rig the law to provide for a self financing trenche of civil servants with targets to make and money to raise to pay for and justify their own existence.


Suprisingly I am in favour of speed cameras and other such methods of road calming, they have restored a little sanity on the main routes into and out of Leeds now and 30mph is now the normal speed for traffic on the A660 and A65 instead of the free for all that it used to be, and the speed humps on the main road near my house serve another very useful purpose in this residential area.

The problem occurs in the whole raft of civil service jobsworths that have been created to support this and their inability or unwillingness to apply common sense decisions to the cases like mine, not to mention the fact that hundreds of millions of pounds have now been raised on the back of a law that forces you to incriminate yourself or face (as in the news story mentioned at the start) huge court costs just for questioning their evidence - I don't know what I'd have done had they threatened me with a £4000 cost for providing the information that they did.