Uninsured Drivers 2017 to 2023
Publication Number: 1488
FOI Number: 20540
Information Request
1) For the years 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24: the number of uninsured drivers that have been caught driving without insurance in your force area.
2) For the years 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24: the number of accidents that have involved uninsured drivers.
3) For the years 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22, 2022-23, 2023-24: the number of vehicles seized because they were uninsured.
FOI Duty
First Duty – Essex Police holds some of the information relating to your request
Second Duty – See below
Fact - It is not possible to extract and verify all the data in your request
Exemption - Section 12(1)
Refusal - Section 17(5) of FOIA
Reasoning – Essex Police are unable to provide a comprehensive data report to meet this request as the data is not available in a readily extractable format, nor is it held on a central log.
With regard to Question 2, Essex Police is unable to report on the number of Road Traffic Collisions (RTCs) that involved an uninsured driver as this is not readily extractable information from our RTC recording system. To attempt to answer this question would require a manual review of each RTC record in the desired time period to ascertain whether the driver of the vehicle not holding valid insurance was recorded in the investigation notes, extracting this information and then collating it into a bespoke report.
To establish if information is held would, therefore, exceed the time and cost limits under the FOIA and would additionally qualify as the creation of data as the results cannot be processed by means of purely sorting or filtering data sources or running a database query tool. There is no requirement under the Act to create data purely to answer FOI requests.
Duty to assist – When refusing a request on cost (Section 12(1)/12(2)), outside of the act and in effort to assist we can provide the following
To address Questions 1 and 3, Essex Police can however provide information on the numbers of Notices of Intended Prosecution (NIPs) issued for driving without insurance and the seizures of vehicles without insurance recorded between 2021 and 2023 from a previous FOI request:
Caveat: The information is correct as at 14 May 2024
Numbers of NIPs Issued for Use a Motor Vehicle on a Road / Public Place Without Third Party Insurance Offences by Year – 2021 to 2023
|
Year |
Number of NIPs Issued |
|
2023 |
1914 |
|
2022 |
1726 |
|
2021 |
1841 |
|
TOTAL |
5481 |
Numbers of Vehicles Seized for Having No Insurance by Year – 2021 to 2023
|
Year |
Number of Seized Vehicles |
|
2021 |
3468 |
|
2022 |
2964 |
|
2023 |
3577 |
|
Total |
10009 |
Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from a number of sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.
FOI Number: 17664
Information Request which has been numbered to assist in this disclosure:
- The number of uninsured drivers that have been caught driving without insurance in your area since the beginning of 2017 up until the most present 2022 data.
- The number of accidents that have involved uninsured drivers in the same time period.
FOI Duty
First Duty – Essex Police holds some of the information relating to your request
Second Duty – See below
Fact - It is not possible to extract and verify all the data in your request
Exemption - Section 12(1)
Refusal - Section 17(5) of FOIA
Reasoning -
With regard to question 2 above, Essex Police does not record data on injury related collisions with uninsured drivers. This would require a manual review of each road collision record to see if an uninsured driver is mentioned. To do so would exceed the time and cost limits of an FOI request.
Duty to assist - When refusing a request on cost (Section 12(1)/12(2), outside of the act and in effort to assist we can provide the following –
Data provided by our Roads Policing Unit.
Caveat: Data is correct as at 07 November 2022
Number of recorded uninsured drivers with outcomes - January 2017 to August 2022
|
Year |
Sent for Prosecution |
Conditional Offer |
|
2017 |
1199 |
567 |
|
2018 |
1428 |
664 |
|
2019 |
1780 |
704 |
|
2020 |
1627 |
689 |
|
2021 |
1282 |
559 |
|
2022 |
801 |
298 |
Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from a number of sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.
General collision data where an injury occurred is available via crashmap.co.uk. You can select up to 21 years past data and navigate the map to see collisions at specific locations – please see below link:
https://www.crashmap.co.uk/Search
Essex Highways produce statistics regarding injury collisions and this data is available on the Safer Essex Road Partnership (SERP) website, under “Explore our data”:
https://saferessexroads.org/collision-data/
TraffWeb Collision Data Map displays information on road traffic collisions. The information displayed is based on the statistics gathered by the Police about road traffic collisions which result in injuries. There is no information on incidents which result in vehicle damage but no injuries.
FOI Number: 15887
Information Request
I wanted to ask how many cars were seized by this force for having no insurance in 2019 and 2020 please. I would like separate figures for both years.
FOI Duty
First Duty – Essex Police does hold information relating to your request.
Second Duty – See below
Fact – See below
Exemption – Not applicable
Essex Police can report as follows:
Caveat: The data is correct as at 06 August 2021.
Note
- The below figures include vehicles seized under Police Powers for No Driving Licence as well as No Insurance as we do not differentiate between the two.
The number of vehicles seized in 2019 was 3,980.
The number of vehicles seized in 2020 was 4,135.
Every effort is made to ensure that the data provided by Essex Police is accurate and complete. However, Essex Police systems are designed primarily for the management of individual cases and not for the purposes of providing data to answer specific FOI enquiries. Please note although data can be extracted from a number of sources via database queries, the results may be subject to inaccuracies. Care should be taken to understand our return when considering the interpretation or further use of the data.