Motor Insurance Enforcement Plan Spells Trouble says BMF
Government plans to introduce Continuous Enforcement of Insurance (CEI) are premature and will only serve to highlight the inadequacies of the current insurance database says the BMF.
Responding to the consultation on the proposals ‘for the Continuous Insurance Enforcement of statutory motor insurance’, the British Motorcyclists Federation says that not only does it have little confidence in the accuracy of the insurance database on which legislation will be based, the database also fails to take account of the different ways in which motorcyclists, especially those with more than one machine, buy and use insurance.
As CIE will operate by identifying those vehicles that appear to be kept uninsured from a comparison of the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority’s ("DVLA"vehicles' register and the Motor Insurance Database held by the Motor Insurers' Bureau (MIB), this is bound to cause errors and as its provisions introduce a new offence of ‘being a registered keeper of a vehicle, which does not meet statutory insurance requirements’, false accusations of being uninsured will result.
Highlighting its concerns, the BMF points out that a recent survey of BMF members found that all vehicles for which members held insurance were not all listed on the Motor Insurance Database, most likely because for motorcyclists who own a number of motorcycles on the same policy, only the principle motorcycle may be recognised by the insurance database.
It also means that if an owner lent a taxed but uninsured machine to a fully insured friend, it could still result in the owner committing an offence!
Collectors of classic motorcycles who have multi-bike policies will be particularly affected because even though their motorcycles are taxed (using the zero rate band), their motorcycles may not always be insured as they spend much of their time garaged. Keeping a database up to date for the occasional times when they are insured for use would be a difficult and expensive operation and for this reason the BMF have called for zero rated classics to be exempt from CEI.
Chris Hodder, the BMF’s Government Relations Executive said: “Given the inaccuracy of the information already on the database, we suspect that a great deal of time and effort will be wasted enforcing the unnecessary. While supporting the need for those caught driving or riding without insurance to be prosecuted, the BMF would like to see this being done through road policing and not through an error-prone ‘blind’ system such as the proposed CIE.”
The consultation document can be found at: http://www.dft.gov.uk/consultations/open/motor/
Originally Posted by SupeRDel
