Introduction

This book aims rstly to set out the law relating to driving offences. Other than practitioner texts there is very little written on offences under statutes such as the Road Trafc Act 1988 and the Road Safety Act 2006. Since driving offences are dealt with by the criminal justice system and are under the jurisdiction of the magistrates’ court and Crown Court, they form part of the substantive criminal law. However, driving offences are rarely studied by undergraduate students of law, perhaps due to the perception that they fall outside the ‘paradigm’ of criminal liability, and, along with other types of offences such as drug offences, are not seen as ‘core’ crimes (see Husak 2005, 65). Driving offences tend to be regarded as mere regulatory offences, which, as noted by Wells in the context of corporate crime and health and safety offences, leads to them being perceived as ‘quasi’ crime rather than ‘true’ crime (Wells 2001, 7). The law relating to road trafc offences is often overlooked by commentators on the criminal law, who tend to focus on the more paradigmatic groups of offences such as homicide offences, offences against the person, sexual offences and property offences. Arguably, however, trafc offences should receive much greater attention, given that it is the one area of the criminal law most likely to touch on the everyday lives of a large majority of the adult population of any industrialized country. Unlike the more paradigmatic types of offences, the average member of the public is conceivably as likely to be a perpetrator of a trafc crime as he or she is to be a victim thereof.