Policy failing - let's court cheap publicity

This blog enjoys a bit of high policy as much as anyone, but it also likes looking under the bonnet to see whether the new model might actually work - or, more commonly, why the clapped out old banger of a policy being given its nth cheap respray isn't likely to start performing all of a sudden.

We're talking about competence.

The government proposes to bring in new powers to seize uninsured vehicles.

Powers due to come into force from April 2009 will make it possible for vehicles to be confiscated as soon as their insurance lapses unless their owners take them off the road.

I've blogged here and here about the government's continuing failure to reduce the numbers of untaxed and uninsured vehicles. When a policy is failing, what better than some cheap publicity? Much better than thinking through how an uncontroversially desirable policy might actually be made to work.

"Uninsured drivers are a menace," say the insurance industry (well, they would). "They often drive unroadworthy vehicles, and the cost of compensating their victims adds an extra £30 a year to premiums paid by honest motorists."

The most unroadworthy vehicles won't be driven by those whose insurance has just lapsed. They're the vehicles that have been uninsured for years.

But how much easier - the new proposal - to write to people who have newly dropped off the database. You know where they live, and many of them will be law-abiding if absent-minded.

According to industry calculations, 5.7% of motorists - about two million people - are uninsured. Most of them are not people who've just dropped off the database ... and it's the long-term uninsured that society should be targeting.

Needless to say, the announcement has no provision for this at all. Several years ago I recall a commentator going out in a police car equipped with Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) software. As The Telegraph says

A number of those caught driving uninsured cars have also been charged with other - in many cases serious - criminal offences.

This makes the software attractive to the police. But as they sat on a busy south London road the software picked up so many unregistered vehicles that the police were overwhelmed and had to give up - which isn't surprising as the 5.7% of uninsured motorists would have had difficulty taxing their vehicles.

So what realistic plans does the government have to reduce this number? Apparently none.