16 November 2005 Blog Home : November 2005 : Permalink
A "24x7 national vehicle movement database" that logs everything on the UK's roads and retains the data for at least two years is now being built, according to an Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) strategy document leaked to the Sunday Times. The system, which will use Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), and will be overseen from a control centre in Hendon, London, is a sort of 'Gatso 2' network, extending. enhancing and linking existing CCTV, ANPR and speedcam systems and databases.
What is rather more scary is that, the reg also notes, this vast expansion of powers is being broght in under a rather odd act of parliament and that, natch, the cops are going to go after the low hanging fruit when booking people:Civil liberties trainspotters will share The Register's pleasure at discovering (as revealed here, in the notes to editors) that the Disclosure of Vehicle Insurance Regulations 2005 "were made under powers provided for in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005." The seriousness of untaxed and uninsured vehicles is at the very least a matter of opinion, but 'organised'?
The new offence of keeping a vehicle without insurance criminalises the previously harmless pastime of keeping an uninsured vehicle in a garage and not driving it, and comes on top of the previous breakthrough of criminalising keeping an untaxed vehicle in a garage and not driving it. The latter was dealt with by requiring owners to register the vehicle as off the road via a Statutory Off-Road Notification. The administrative convenience of turning not doing anything wrong into a crime will allow the Government to issue fixed penalty notices for failing to renew insurance on time, while there's also now a fixed penalty for late renewal of tax discs (previously, you could pay in arrears). In both cases the penalties are clearly only going to hit people who've previously been registered with the system. Dealing with the large numbers of entirely unregistered and uninsured vehicles will require real-time alerts and pursuit, and these vehicles will have to be differentiated from the many foreign registered cars on the UK's roads. As it will be a lot easier and cheaper to fine the law-abiding but forgetful than it will be to deal with the hardline serial offenders, we think we can guess which way this one will go.
With legislation like this in blighty I'm rather glad I live in France. I just hope Sarko doesn't get any ideas from this.