MIB to step up fight against uninsured drivers

MIB has announced a £5m investment to get uninsured drivers off the roads sooner and make roads safer.

Since 2005, MIB’s work with government, insurers and the police has helped seize more than 2.5 million uninsured vehicles.

However, the MIB Board has approved the significant investment to scale up the work. The programme’s discovery phase has seen MIB review and analyse data and current methods to see how to make them work better, as well as beginning to identify and plan for new initiatives beginning in 2024.

MIB’s Martin Saunders said: “We’ve made good progress in a short space of time. We’ve expanded our enforcement team to support and equip the police at the roadside, committed to fund Operational Tutelage for another three years, and have already started work to refresh the way we work with the DVLA to compare a list of vehicles on the road with those that carry insurance to help identify problem vehicles and inform motorists to buy insurance.

“But there’s lots more we’re going to do. We’ll have a big focus on leveraging technologies and data in our digital world such as utilising predictive analytics; better informed ‘hotspots’ and establishing partnerships with those who we believe can help tackle the uninsured problem.

“We’ll also continue influencing government because we don’t believe the current penalties for driving uninsured are a strong enough deterrent. With this more focused and co-ordinated approach, there will be no hiding places for those who continue to flout the law.”

James Dalton, chief services officer at MIB, said: “Uninsured driving has huge physical, emotional and economic impact, so we have to do all we can to turn our vision into reality and make driving without insurance a thing of the past.

“We’ve got huge plans to test and trial new ideas to come up with the most effective package of initiatives that make sure uninsured drivers have nowhere to hide and we can get them off the roads before it’s too late.”