Six points for remaining silent

New laws from Monday mean riders could be better off admitting to speeding even if they know they weren’t, the RAC Foundation has said.

From September 24, the penalty for failing to tell police who was riding your motorcycle at the time of an offence rises from three points to six.

If a motorcycle owner doesn’t know who was riding his motorcycle when it was caught speeding, he’d be better to simply say it was him as the penalty for speeding is usually only three points, the Foundation said.

Spokeswoman Sheila Rainger said: “I suspect the background to this is that a lot of police forces have become quite impatient with people saying they don’t know who was driving or riding at the time, so to crack down on that, unfortunately, there will be some people who genuinely don’t know but will be in this very difficult situation.”

The change is part of the Road Safety Act 2006, which amends the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988 by ‘raising from three to six the number of penalty points which can be imposed for the offence of failing to provide information about the identity of a driver’.

Read the Statutory Instrument introducing the change here:

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2007/20072472.htm

Get MCN, on sale September 19, to read how speeding penalties are also expected to change later this year.