MIB has announced a £5 million investment to increase its work to get uninsured drivers off the roads sooner and make roads safer.
Since 2005, MIB’s work with government, insurers and the police have helped seize more than 2.5 million uninsured vehicles.
However, uninsured driving remains a huge problem in society, causing devastation to innocent victims and their families. Uninsured driving impacts the cost of the MIB levy and inevitably increases the cost of motor insurance for honest premium-paying customers.
For more than 70 years MIB has been committed to compensating those victims quickly, fairly and compassionately. However, compensating victims is only dealing with the problem when it’s too late. By putting more effort into reducing uninsured driving in the first place, MIB is working towards a day when there will be no victims.
The MIB Board has approved the significant investment to scale up the work in getting uninsured drivers off our roads. 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, who is leading the programme, says there’s a lot more to come: “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, says this new investment will help to achieve MIB’s long-term vision is to end uninsured driving for good: “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 know there is a clear link between those who choose to drive without insurance and other forms of criminality. Burglaries, drug offences, violent crime – these are people we don’t want on the roads because they pose a real danger to all of us.
“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.”