Advice on handling a speeding ticket that was never sent

I think you need to take a step back.

All you know is what you have been told by your insurers. They say you have been convicted by Nottingham Magistrates’ Court. The details you posted in post #9 confirms that it was indeed a conviction from a Magistrate’s’ Court (rather than a fixed penalty).

The police say no action has been taken for any offences involving your car. Nottingham court has no convictions in your name and nobody has been chasing you for payment of the fine and costs etc. (which will amount to about £400). With a conviction date four months ago, I should have thought they would have been on to you by now.

If your suspicion about your ex’s sister is correct, I doubt she has paid £400 just to see you with three points on your licence. If anybody knocked on her door demanding money with menaces, I imagine she would have given them your address.

The most likely explanation for me is that somebody else was convicted in the Nottingham court for an offence involving a car other than yours. They have paid the fine, etc., but there has been an error made, either by the court or the DVLA, in the process used see the endorsement added to your record.

I think you must find out from the DVLA who instructed them to endorse your licence. They need to check what they have done to ensure they have not made an error. If they have not, you must go to whoever instructed them.

I think as much as the vindictive Sister-in-Law angle is intriguing (and potentially entertaining), that neither the Police nor Courts have a record of a conviction in your name, or any action issued in your name or against your VRN would suggest this is probably an admin error.

I couldn't find the post Andy was referencing earlier that I also recall, where I think the OP had multiple convictions due to a ticket scamming operation, but I did find this one from last year.

https://www.ftla.uk/speeding-and-other-criminal-offences/incorrect-endorsement-information-on-my-driving-licence-advice/

They may not have any record against Paul Jones, but that doesn't mean they haven't messed up processing Phil Jones' conviction who happens to have the same birthdate.

Edit. As Andy said, the DVLA being helpful is a sign of impending doom. However the DVLA being helpful but denying they f**ked up is probably likely and resets the threat level. 

If anyone's interested, this is the current situation:
- DVLA won't help as they say they don't keep any records of the court instruction, but would accept a request from the MC to remove the endorsement
- The MC have no records of any case on file with my records, so are deferring to the police
- The police aren't able to search for other people's records on my behalf, so unless I miraculously get my ex to confess or something it's not going anywhere

At this point I might as well just ask my insurance if they want to have a gander...

The court have the date, the judgement and your licence number. It shouldn't be too hard to track down the case. It is more a case of you are dealing with a group of people who don't want to do it. But keep at them. There is no way that they can claim t0 have applied justice correctly if they have punished the wrong person. 

If you really are getting nowhere, then it would be worth writing to (emailing) your MP, being very clear (but concise) what the position is and what you want done about it. If you can engage them, MPs have more influence as public bodies will jump a bit higher when that letter from an MP arrives. Don't start on the conspiracy theories about your ex, just stick to the known facts and the obstinacy/finger pointing of the DVLA/MC.

The court have the date, the judgement and your licence number. It shouldn't be too hard to track down the case...

Is that necessarily right?

If the error is at DVLA's end (eg a transposition error or "fat finger" error) it may not help the mags court to know the OP's DL number (or name and DOB)

All we know (or can presume) is that somebody else's conviction got wrongly recorded against the OP's licence (and name).

Depending on the nature and extent of the error (and who committed it) the mags court may have no details that can be linked to the OP.

(I am assuming the court have already genuinely tried to find these details and have failed.  Or at least that is what they have told the OP.  I suppose the next step would be for court staff to look at every relevant conviction on the date in question and check to see if those convictions have been recorded against the correct licences and drivers by the DVLA.  Or perhaps they have the power to direct the DVLA to do that?)

I've never read any Kafka, but I know what Kafkaesque means.

We are dealing with two intransigent and incompetent state bodies who both both consider themselves to be *the law* (or otherwise above the law), and that this isn't their problem. Taking what the OP has told us at face value, one of them has f*cked up (possibly both, but Occam's razor suggests that that is unlikely).

Both bodies are overseen (to a greater or lesser extent) by the relevant ministers, and the High Court has supervisory jurisdiction over all public bodies that are not directly answerable to Parliament.

The "appeal of last resort" is an application for Judicial Review (the High Court). If all else fails, IMHO the last resort would be to apply for a Judicial Review against both parties - Nottinghamshire Magistrates' Court and the DVLA. Whilst presumably one of those parties is innocent, the guilty party would be responsible for the innocent party necessarily being dragged through the process.

A Judicial Review application, as with virtually all litigation, has a pre-action protocol. That protocol (basically a Letter Before Action) might serve to readjust their "not my problem" attitude, although I wouldn't hold my breath.

Logically, if the court will inform the DVLA that they never ordered the endrosement of your licence, then it would seem to be irrational for the DVLA not to rescind the endorsement, and in the same vein, if the court were minded to do that, it would seem irrational for them not to further instruct the DVLA to rescind the endorsement.

What it is important to *focus* on what you know, rather than what you merely suspect, if this issue is the result of fraud (and perjury/perverting the course of justice/contempt of court/etc.) then the court could potentially have been blameless in their actions (although as a matter of law the conviction must be wrong, regardless of whether they should have known) - but *if* they did convict you wrongly due to fraud, they were IMHO clearly wrong not to find any record of it.

Personally, I consider endorsing a driver's licence without retaining a copy of the instruction to be exceedingly arrogant and systemically incompetent - or from the DVLA's perspective, business as usual.

You may be interested in this thread from another forum, which dealt with a very similar problem to yours:

https://nationalconsumerservice.co.uk/topic/474462-someone-elses-offence-and-points-on-my-driving-licence-record-at-dvla/

You will see there was eventually a satisfactory outcome, but that was more by virtue of a bit of luck and a following wind than anything either the court or the DVLA did.

Quote from: BertB on August 27, 2026, 01:13:05 pm

The court have the date, the judgement and your licence number. It shouldn't be too hard to track down the case...

Is that necessarily right?

If the error is at DVLA's end (eg a transposition error or "fat finger" error) it may not help the mags court to know the OP's DL number (or name and DOB)

All we know (or can presume) is that somebody else's conviction got wrongly recorded against the OP's licence (and name).

Depending on the nature and extent of the error (and who committed it) the mags court may have no details that can be linked to the OP.

(I am assuming the court have already genuinely tried to find these details and have failed.  Or at least that is what they have told the OP.  I suppose the next step would be for court staff to look at every relevant conviction on the date in question and check to see if those convictions have been recorded against the correct licences and drivers by the DVLA.  Or perhaps they have the power to direct the DVLA to do that?)

You have more or less just repeated my suggestion. If the DVLA do not keep records (Shocking but unsurprising) the only course of action is via the MC. Given the detail known versus the potential detail unknown, they should still be in a position to recover the documentation regarding the conviction with the information the OP has.

OP: Have you submitted a SAR to DVLA yet (include specifically for any information / communications that reference said endorsements)? Whilst the people on web chat and the phones may not have access to or see the court requests, the data controller or assistant may well be able to.

You may also have some luck contacting your local MP. https://members.parliament.uk/FindYourMP

Have you told your insurer that you are following this up, and keeping them updated? It may be that they enforce you to pay a slightly increased premium (which ideally you'd get refunded if this does turn out to be a complete stuff-up).

Just an update on the situation so far:
The DVLA have acknowledged my complaint about the situation with no firm timeline about when they will reply.
I have gotten around to updating the address on my driving license in hopes that this won't happen again, but have yet to receive my updated license.
The MC have agreed to send a form to the DVLA today requesting that the points be removed from my license.
My insurance company have decided to let the points stand for now until the DVLA decide to take the points off themselves.

I suppose I'll see how things shake out for now. I guess I could always try to complain to the ICO if this doesn't work out?

If we take what the DVLA said (possibly in the external thread NJ linked) at face value (that the court applied the endorsement directly via a remote link, and DVLA had no involvement in the process beyond it being their database) then the fault lay solely with the court, and the court appear to have agreed to resolve the matter. If and when this will happen, is another matter - although saying that they are going to send it today is promising.

Whilst we don't see many of these cases, they are probably the most frustrating as we are generally dealing with 2 intransigent public bodies who consider it not to be their problem, and we have limited understanding of the nuts and bolts of the process.

If anyone happens to have access to a tame magistrates' court legal advisor, it would be potentially very helpful going forward to understand as much detail of how the endorsements are currently applied as possible - from the court's perspective, as whilst I am more than happy to accept the possibility that the DVLA's explanation as to how it's absolutely not their fault could potentially be both true and accurate, I would consider it somewhat rash to take their account at face value without some form of independent corroboration.

If we can be certain that the court dropped the ball, other than asking them nicely to pick it back up again, or asking your MP to shout at someone, the legal recourse would still seem to be Judicial Review.

I have been in touch with a “Tame Legal Advisor” (TLA) to get a basic understanding of how this process works.

The court system (which was previously “Libra” but which has now been replaced with the “Common Platform” system) maintains details of each individual case, referenced by the court’s Unique Reference Number  (URN). This holds the defendant’s details (including his DL number -if known), the charge and the offence date. Also included in Road Traffic cases is the defendant’s driving record, scraped from the DVLA database.

When the outcome is known details of the penalty are entered onto that same system. For Road Traffic offences this would include the endorsement code and  number of points/ length of DQ.

Although they are being encouraged to do so, in my TLA’s court, this is not usually done by the LA in “real time” in the courtroom. She believes this is the case in most courts. Instead, these details are written on a paper file (** but see below).  Only at the end of the court session – and possibly not until the next day – are the electronic case files updated with the outcome details (either by the LA or an admin assistant).

Daily, these new conviction details are uploaded to the DVLA system which automatically populates the drivers’ records with the endorsement details. 

** As an aside, my LA tells me that she usually manages to make  most entries in “real time”  during a SJ session. There, of course, she only has a compliant Justice to manipulate and is not troubled by stroppy defendants and advocates. 

So, contrary to my earlier understanding, nobody at the DVLA has anything to do with applying endorsement details to a driver’s record. They do not “receive instructions” from courts to update driver’s records. That is done via the feed from the courts’ platform to the DVLA. So I can understand the DVLA’s stance that it is “nuffink to do with me, guv.”

The only place I can see this falling down (as seems to have happened to the OP) is in between the paper record which was updated in the courtroom and the eventual transcription of that record which was then uploaded to the DVLA database. But the paper records begin their life as a printout from the Common Platform and that would include the URN, the defendant’s details and usually his DL number. So there doesn’t seem much scope for error there (unless the original Common Platform entry was incorrect).

I did acually tell her why I was asking and she really could not understand how it could have occurred. She emphasised that different courts may operate the practicalities differently but concluded with "Such a thing could not possibly happen in my court" so I thought it was time to take my leave as I had no wish to see her transformed into an ALA!