Uninsured drivers a ‘problem as old as the hills’

Almost 200,000 people drive without insurance in Ireland making it one of the most commonly committed crimes in the State, and despite the cost to car-driving consumers and society at large, the numbers breaking the law is growing.

According to new estimates from the Motor Insurers’ Bureau of Ireland, just under 188,000 private vehicles were driving without insurance last year, an increase of 13,600 on 2021.

The real number is likely to be even worse as the figures are based on comparing car owners paying motor tax and the number of vehicles with active insurance policies. They do not include those who pay neither car insurance nor motor tax.

The problem, said transport consultant Conor Faughnan, was “as old as the hills” and one which has little to do with the affordability or otherwise of premiums. “It just persists in good times and bad and it’s always around a 6-8 per cent figure.”

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By contrast, the figures in the UK are substantially less – with the percentage of uninsured drivers typically around 4 per cent.

Mr Faughnan points to different factors driving the numbers higher from the benign to the malevolent. “It is possible to be an uninsured driver for honest reasons, for example, if you move from one policy to another and forget to add your spouse to the new policy.”

There are also people who take a chance and drive a parent’s car without having the proper insurance. “They feel they can get away with it and they are often proved right. We see that complacency in other ways such as those people who have driven for 30 years on a learner permit.”

He also points to the “outright deception and fraud” and “the guy who already has three driving bans, and no licence”.

The penalties are there to stop it happening and, if caught, the uninsured face an automatic court appearance, five penalty points, substantial fines and the seizing of a vehicle. But how many people are detected?

Last year the Dáil heard about 130 uninsured drivers were caught daily, amounting to about 47,450 drivers each year. In recent years more than 100,000 cars have been seized with over €15 million in fines handed down for driving without insurance, averaging about 9,000 each year.

While 9,000 fines a year sounds impressive, it leaves about 180,000 uninsured drivers facing no penalty whatsoever.

“Clearly not enough is being done to discourage uninsured driving in this country,” said David Fitzgerald, chief executive of the MIBI, a non-profit organisation set up to compensate victims of road traffic accidents caused by uninsured and unidentified vehicles.

The solution seems simple. Allow gardaí identify uninsured drivers using number plate recognition software known as Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR).

The technology – which can read every vehicle registration plate that passes a checkpoint – can identify the insurance company with which a person has their policy and the validity of their tax. It has been in place for more than a decade.

Theoretically the technology can solve the problem but it relies on clean data and the full integration of insurance databases with Garda systems.

“If the Government wanted to take action on this issue, they would be pressing for the full and immediate implementation of that system. However, as the relevant legislation required to completely enable that is still working its way through the Oireachtas, it would seem we still have some distance to travel before the country really clamps down on the problem of uninsured driving,” Mr Fitzgerald said.

“It’s partly bureaucratic inertia,” said Mr Faughnan, and “partly slowness on the part of the insurance companies. But it is also an enormous technical project and not quite as straightforward as most people would intuitively think.”

He said that early usage of the insurance ID system returned a huge number of mistakes. “If the technology is just pinging far too many false positives, it is of no practical use.”

Uninsured motorists added about €40 on to every premium but that in itself was part of a problem, said Mr Faughnan, because “it is the consumer who pays that money ultimately, so the whole system prices it in and charges the punter. You might rhetorically agree that €80 million is being wasted, but the industry is not actually incentivised to fix it.”

A Garda spokesman said the force was working with the insurance industry to provide real time data regarding the insurance status of drivers. While waiting for the full implementation of a revamped database, gardaí are continuing to check the insurance status of a driver either via an app or the ANPR.

“When a Garda member gets an ‘no insurance’ alert [they] will always have to check with the driver’s insurance company to verify the data. This check will be in place until the legislation is in place for a direct link between the Garda mobility device and the Irish motor insurance database,” the spokesman said.

He said “significant investment in ANPR technology has been made to date [with] 127 Garda vehicles equipped with such technology”.

The insurance sector says it wants more done. “Uninsured driving is not a victimless crime,” a spokeswoman for Insurance Ireland said, adding that members were “very supportive of the increased use of technology”.