Free Traffic Legal Advice

Having just come off an 'Awareness Course' which thankfully avoided me getting points on my licence, OP (and again this is not without some sympathy and empathy, based upon your posts*) I think your arguments so far are wishy-washy, lack hard facts and are unlikely to melt the heart of a Magistrate who probably thought that sitting on the Bench was going to be more intellectually challenging than 'Oh dear, not another plea not to be endorsed'.

So when you appear, having I presume pleaded guilty(it is after all a strict liability offence) what would you say? I read the SJP notice that you can plead guilty but still request to attend court regarding which subsequent procedures and paperwork would follow i.e. you only have to decide whether to plead guilty or not by 5 Aug, not to have your 'not to be endorsed' argument set out in detail. Or is this not correct?

So, to plead guilty or not?

*- your posts appear to be at odds with Constable Sutton's witness statement where he says you claimed that the car was insured on a 'fleet' policy. I can't reconcile this with your posts here. IMO 'fleet policy' implies a company insuring vehicles and not, as here, a couple having two or more cars in the family, jointly owned but each with one of the couple as the insured party.

Two possible scenarios: two cars jointly owned but for practical purposes one is considered to be hers and one yours. One of the couple- in this case your wife- takes responsibility for these hands-on admin. tasks. You have separated since the last time the insurance on your car was renewed and she received an autorenew notice and responded by positively cancelling the insurance without giving you notice as some form of retribution, all of which happened a matter of days before you were stopped, possibly following a recent meeting to discuss relief and custody, or

The car's been uninsured for months and she told you about it ages ago because you had agreed between you, but not finalised that the car was to be yours.

I don't want to pry, but as has been posted earlier these issues are very fact specific. And I'm still not quite certain about the insured parties here. If you are/were the insured party then an autorenew notice would be addressed to you. From which must follow that you were not the insured party. So you were driving the only family car or perhaps 'her' car and she had cancelled the insurance before handing to you..or perhaps this is to do with 'fleet insurance'??

And by the way, what were your 6 points awarded for?

As I understand it...

An insured party is any person or entity that is legally qualified to receive insurance payments after a loss occurs.

Nothing to do with who may drive.

I appreciate your feedback H C, my arguments may be wishy washy or I am not the best communicator or if I was to write every single detail it may be very long. On the form I pled guilty and asked to attend court. There was a space for adding more info which I stated I wanted to raise SRNTE. It said that I can provide full information when I attend. I read somewhere it may be worth writing separately to the prosecuters office and ask them to dismiss, what do you think?

I am not sure why he mentions fleet policy he may have confused that with multi car policy. He fails to mention all the details I gave him regarding it appearing to be a deliberate act by my wife. We had a long chat and most of it doesn't appear in his statement.

" One of the couple- in this case your wife- takes responsibility for these hands-on admin. tasks. You have separated since the last time the insurance on your car was renewed and she received an autorenew notice and responded by positively cancelling the insurance without giving you notice as some form of retribution"
This is basically sums up what happened and hopefully can prove this once I receive subject access report from the insurers.

There is still only one main policy holder on a multicar policy. All correspondence was addressed to her. Even as a named driver on the policy the insurance company wouldn't discuss with me over the phone.

Having just checked my license 3 points have been removed as they have expired so I currently have 3 points for speeding.

Considering that the current offence was committed less than 6 months ago, and assuming that the 3 points that the OP no longer has are now no longer showing on the DVLA site due to being more than 4 years old (from date of offence), and/or that the OP has given no other indication of the date of that offence of age of the points, I would suggest that it would require a very "special" type of intellect to determine unequivocally that the OP is liable to tot.

My point stands, if they had 6 points when the insurance offence was committed, and they fail to convince the court not to award another 6 points, totting will occur.

actually it’s not whether they ‘had’ 6 points it’s whether 6 points counted for totting, as AF has pointed out you can ‘have’ points that are between 3 and 4 years old on your licence, but being over 3 years old (at the date of the offence) they wouldn’t count for totting.

Using ‘have/had’ is thus fraught with the danger of that mistake.

OP, perhaps you can clarify if they were more than 3 years prior to the offence date of not.

In any event, IMO the driver at any time is under a duty to check that the vehicle they're driving is insured. Or has this become somebody else's responsibility?

Twaddle.

There is no duty to check that you are insured. I know that I'm insured and have no need to routinely check, and commit no offence by not checking.

However, driving without insurance is a strict liability offence (apart from the statutory defence for company cars which does not apply to this case). If you are not insured you commit the offence regardless of whether you never checked, or whether you have a copy of the certificate in your hand, not realising that somebody has cancelled the policy. Obviously a bench would be far more likely to find SRNtE in the latter example than the former, all things being equal, but that has not create a duty to check.

From what little the OP has told us, I am not expecting too much sympathy from the bench, but his options seem to be to spend half a day in court and throw himself on the court's mercy or avoid spending half a day in court and have an IN10 endorsement to declare for the following 5 years, as well as being 1 slip-up from a totting ban until the other 3 points expire (unless as seems to have been suggested he could hypothetically be facing a totting ban already if the points that have already come off his licence aren't 4 years old for another 6 months).

If the OP wants to give us the details, we can potentially guide him in presenting them in such a way as to not unnecessarily aggravate the bench, although beyond the criteria for SRNtE already posted, there's not a lot that can be "shaped" in a fact specific submission which is sworn to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth - other than advise the OP to have answers for any obvious questions that the bench would be likely to ask.

@the_rookie 

The offense that was removed was more than 4 years from the date of this incident.

So that offence was never going to count for totting (over 3 years old at the time of the offence) and that's off the table.

What do you think about contacting the proescuters office before the hearing to ask them to drop the charges?

Plus I have a message screenshot of her essentially admitting to removing me from the insurance. Also how common is it for police to allow you to do insurance on the spot when they have stopped yourather than impound the car?

They won't drop the charges, not a chance.

That will help (assuming said message post dates the offence!)
Entirely at their discretion, usually only offered where there seems an 'honest' mistake as opposed to planned or 'abject dumbness' cases, but irrelevant to any subsequent court case.