A “game-changer” amendment to road traffic legislation allowing gardaí to identify disqualified drivers on the spot has been delayed until next year.
The regulation, which was due to come into effect on December 1st, marked the final step in a years-long effort to close the net on thousands of banned motorists still on the State’s roads.
Gardaí currently have access to the Irish Motor Insurance Database (IMID) to help detect drivers operating without insurance on the roads. When the amendment is commenced, gardaí will have real-time access to driver numbers, allowing them to identify those who are disqualified. Motorists have a unique driver number, held for life, on their licence or learner permit.
The delay, until March 31st next, is linked to the requirement for motorists to provide their driver number to insurers and brokers to renew their insurance. Insurers will not be permitted to issue a policy without the driver number of everyone named on a policy. The numbers will be validated against the Department of Transport’s National Vehicle and Driver File (NVDF).
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The Department of Transport said “industry representatives in October advised that a delay would be required” to complete changes to insurer IT systems in order to capture all driver numbers, “and to allow more time to communicate the new requirements to the public”.
Insurance Ireland chief executive Moyagh Murdock said the “pragmatic approach was to defer the commencement date” for everyone “to ensure that both insurers’ IT platforms and those IT software platforms provided for use by brokers were ready on the same day”.
Susan Gray, of the Parc road safety campaign group, said the organisation has been campaigning since 2011 for gardaí to get access to real-time information, not only on vehicles but on the driving licence and unique driver numbers of vehicle owners and drivers.
She said that after 14 years of campaigning “come March, gardaí with their mobility devices can, through a car’s registration number, tell not only if the driver is uninsured but also disqualified. They will also know if any named driver on the insurance policy is disqualified.”
Ms Gray said it was a “game-changer” but that it was essential “to ensure that this is done properly and that nobody slips the net”.
Insurers gathering driver numbers follows unsuccessful efforts to oblige drivers prosecuted for road safety offences to surrender their licences to the courts, despite the legislation being commenced in October 2011 by then minister for transport Leo Varadkar.
Parc monitored court cases and sent reports to the department and RSA. These showed that “people who were convicted of penalty-point offences were not presenting their licences in court to have their unique driver number recorded”, so their penalty points or disqualification could not be recorded, Ms Gray said.
Between 9,000 and 10,000 drivers annually are disqualified in the courts, but just 3 per cent of learner drivers and fewer than 10 per cent of qualified motorists surrender their licence.
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