Driving Offences: Promoting Consistency for Victims in "victimless" Crimes of Endangerment

On 16th July 2019 the Department for Transport (DfT) announced a two-year long review into roads policing and traffic enforcement to highlight best practice and identify gaps in service. The road safety minister stated that “we have strong laws in place to ensure people are kept safe on our roads at all times. But roads policing is a key deterrent in stopping drivers breaking the law and risking their and other people’s lives.”1 The authors are largely in agreement with this statement but, as we found through our recent research into the enforcement of driving offences, enforcement is inconsistent and variable, both in the resources allocated to enforcement and in the way in which the present law is interpreted and enforced. We will set out some of the most important findings in this article. Some of the initiatives we examined have been recognised by the DfT in its Road Safety Action Plan, published a few days after the review was announced