There is much criticism from lawyers of the attitudes of lay magistrates. A common term of derision is [was] that they are muppets. Another is that they are so inured to the lies of witnesses, including defendants, that they can`t tell an innocent or truthful account from a pack of lies. But similar criticisms radiate from the bench to those in the dock. There are moments on the bench when there is a collective intake of breath owing not to outrage, nor puzzlement but something closer to weary contempt.
There stands a defendant who is not impoverished, not confused, not a victim of circumstance. S/he is accused of using a mobile phone whilst driving. Facts before the court are that s/he was driving a late-model Audi or a BMW or a Mercedes or Jaguar or almost any model bar the most basic produced in the last ten years. It can reasonably be assumed the vehicle came with a touchscreen infotainment system, a Bluetooth connection, Apple CarPlay and probably a built-in voice assistant capable of reading messages aloud while the driver keeps both hands on the wheel and eyes on the road. And yet here stands that defendant having been caught with a mobile phone pressed to an ear or balanced on a knee or clutched in one hand while the steering wheel was attended to by the other.
The mitigation when it comes is invariably the same: I only glanced at it for a second. One second. At 60 mph, that is approximately 88 feet covered in one second of blind travel. One second. At 30 mph in a residential street that is still 44 feet per second; enough to miss a child stepping from between parked cars.
The Home Office publishes annual roads policing data drawn from the national PentiP processing system covering 43 forces across England and Wales though with characteristic institutional inconsistency excluding the Metropolitan Police Service which continues to operate its own parallel recording system as though the capital exists in a separate judicial universe. On those terms 36,842 fixed penalty notices were issued for the use of a handheld mobile phone while driving in 2023. This represented a 33% increase on the previous year's figure of 27,776. In 2024, enforcement rose by a further estimated 11% pushing the total to somewhere in the region of 40,900. For 2025 full-year data has not yet been published; the Home Office's roads policing statistical bulletin running to December 2024 was only released in March 2026 and covers nothing beyond that.
Set those figures alongside data obtained by freedom of information requests from individual forces and a picture begins to emerge. Greater Manchester Police issued nearly 12,000 penalties across the 2023–2025 period. The Metropolitan Police, perennially hard to pin down, appears to have issued around 7,000 across the same span; a figure that, if accurate, looks remarkably modest for a force policing one of the most congested and densely populated areas of Europe. Whether this reflects a genuine enforcement deficit or merely the MPS's customary reluctance to submit its data to national aggregation is a matter for another day.
For readers who are not involved in the justice system here are a few facts. The penalty for being caught using a mobile whilst driving is £200 and six points. Since March 2017 there has been no facility to attend a speed awareness-style course in lieu of points, Parliament having decided, with some firmness of purpose, that the 2017 tightening of the legislation would also remove the escape hatch that had previously allowed first-time offenders to avoid endorsement. A newly qualified driver who picks up six points within two years of passing their test will have their licence revoked automatically. Even for experienced drivers a second offence within three years means twelve points and the near-certainty of a totting-up disqualification unless exceptional hardship can be demonstrated. These are not trivial consequences. They are, by the standards of summary justice, quite severe. And yet tens of thousands of drivers continue to be caught every year.
The kernel of this post is why do so many tens of thousands of drivers of vehicles equipped with manufacturer-proprietary systems that allow calls to be made, received and managed entirely through the steering wheel controls or by voice command fail to use the technology they have purchased. The driver need not touch the phone at all. The phone can remain in a pocket, a bag or a glovebox. It need not even be visible. The technology that renders the offence entirely avoidable has been sitting in the dashboard since the car was delivered from the showroom. This being so, one is compelled professionally, judicially, as a matter of straightforward logic, to ask what category of person in possession of such a vehicle finds themselves nonetheless prosecuted for using a handheld device. The taxonomy, it seems to me, offers only three possibilities.
The first is ignorance. The driver genuinely does not know that their car has Bluetooth, has never paired their phone and has never investigated what the various buttons on their steering column actually do. This is an increasingly implausible defence as the years pass and as manufacturers' interfaces become ever more intuitive as dealers routinely demonstrate the pairing process on handover and as the government's "THINK!" campaign has spent considerable public money ensuring that drivers understand the rules. But let us grant that some small minority of drivers falls into this category. They are not malicious. They are simply inattentive to the world around them in a manner that is, in itself, mildly alarming in someone who is simultaneously operating a vehicle.
The second possibility is arrogance. The driver knows the law, knows the penalty, knows that their car has Bluetooth and has simply decided that the inconvenience of using it or the mild social embarrassment of asking a caller to hold while they connect is not worth the bother. The call is important. They are an important person. Their time is valuable. The law is, in this particular respect, a nuisance designed for other people. This driver, encountered in the dock, will often display a certain incredulous quality during proceedings, a faint air of surprise that the matter has been pursued to this point, as though the entire apparatus of prosecution and penalty has misunderstood who they are dealing with.
The third is wilful stupidity; perhaps the most common and certainly the most resistant to deterrence. This is the driver who knows the rules in the abstract but who, in the moment, simply does not apply them. The phone rings and the impulse to look is overwhelming. The risk feels remote. Nobody ever thinks they will be the one who is caught or the one who causes a collision. Optimism bias is a powerful cognitive force and it kills people. According to the Department for Transport's reported statistics, mobile phone use contributes to a significant number of serious collisions each year although precise attribution is notoriously difficult, since the phone is rarely still in the driver's hand by the time investigators arrive.
The magistrates' courts process those cases that are contested. The precise number who take this route and the proportion who succeed in obtaining an acquittal is not published in any disaggregated form by the Ministry of Justice. What we know is that the overall acquittal rate at magistrates' courts, across all offences, historically runs at somewhere between 16% and 17% of contested cases. A successful challenge to a mobile phone offence typically rests on disputing the officer's visual identification of the device arguing that what was seen was not a phone or that the driver was not using it in the proscribed manner. Since the 2017 amendment extended the definition of "use" considerably, such arguments have become harder to sustain, though they are still attempted. I remember all too clearly the taxi driver stopped at traffic lights, and in sight of a police officer on his beat, who offered the excuse that he was using the phone as his GP had recommended to massage an area of his face to alleviate the symptoms of his recently acquired Bell`s Palsy. Needless to say the bench was not impressed.
The Single Justice Procedure, that curious and still somewhat controversial mechanism by which a single magistrate deals with summary cases "on the papers" without either party appearing in court, handles a substantial and growing proportion of motoring matters. In the first quarter of 2025 alone over 224,000 defendants were dealt with via SJP, representing 67% of all defendants at magistrates' courts. Whether the efficiency gains of this approach come at an acceptable cost in terms of procedural justice is a debate that runs through the professional literature and which this blog has addressed more than once previously. For present purposes, the relevant point is that most mobile phone FPN cases that reach the courts at all will be processed in this manner, quietly and without ceremony, resulting in a fine and endorsement appearing on a licence without the defendant ever setting foot in a courtroom.
Enforcement is rising, which is welcome. The penalty is significant, which is appropriate. The technology that removes any legitimate justification for the offence is now standard in the vast majority of vehicles on the road. The law is clear, widely publicised and robustly prosecuted. That nearly 41,000 people were still caught in 2024 alone and that the true figure, including the Metropolitan Police's contribution and the inevitable dark figure of undetected offending, will be considerably higher, suggests that we are not dealing with a problem of legal uncertainty or technological deprivation. We are dealing with a problem of character and/or personality. Specifically, the character of a driver who, in a car equipped with every conceivable hands-free facility, reaches for their phone anyway.
From a personal point of view since 1995, before the availability of Bluetooth, I have had a mobile phone. When that technology was available I had it fitted in all my cars. And laterally, as above, such system has been installed by virtually all car manufacturers worldwide. Like others of my generation I was brought up in an era where rightly or wrongly the mere thought of breaking the law was enough to mitigate that possibility however remote. Just as drink driving has, amongst a majority of drivers, become a socially contemptible offence perhaps all we can wish for is a similar reaction in society as a whole to using a mobile phone whilst driving.
No comments:
Post a Comment