Expired driving licence offences (FOI ref: 1072/26)

Request

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I would like to request the following information for the years 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 to date

1. Please provide the number of UK drivers who were caught driving with an expired driving licence, broken down by calendar years 2023, 2024, 2025, and 2026 in your force area

2. Please provide the number of police penalties (including fines, points, or prosecution) issued to drivers who were driving with an expired driving licence broken down by calendar years 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026 in your force area

Response

Our data is not organised in such a way as to allow us to provide this information within the appropriate (cost) limit under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act.

I have approached the relevant departments for this information (the Central Ticket Office, the Traffic Investigation Unit, and the Camera Enforcement Unit), who have all confirmed that there is no central marker, flag or code within their systems for “expired licence”, which would allow easy identification of the information you are seeking.

Therefore, to try to identify relevant information, we would need to locate, retrieve and manually review each recorded driving offence, speeding record, RTC log, collision investigation, etc.

In addition to this, prosecution data is held on a separate system, and it does not have a filter by which a specific offence can be searched. Therefore, to answer this part of your request would require manually checking all historic court sheets to pull out the ones which relate to an expired licence and then conducting further checks for the recorded disposal. We currently list over 1,000 cases a month.

Given the many thousands of records held, which would need to be searched, this would be a vast undertaking. Even to provide one month of data, let alone 4 plus years, would significantly exceed the appropriate limit (FOIA, s.12).

This means that the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information would exceed the appropriate limit under section 12(1) as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004.

In accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000, this letter acts as a Refusal Notice for this request.

Unfortunately, due to the reasons outlined above, I am unable to suggest any practical way in which your request may be modified in order to satisfy your query or bring it within the 18 hours stipulated by the Regulations. I am however willing to consider any refinements that you are able to make to your request, in accordance with Section 16 of the Freedom of Information Act.

Further information on section 12 of FOI is available here:

Freedom of information | College of Policing - Section 12

Assistance

The DVLA might hold information relevant to your request, and I have provided a link to the DfT FOI page for you below:

https://www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/freedom-of-information-request/