Sally Allen: My gruelling and costly run-in with the law

By the time you read this I will have just completed a few weeks in purdah. In short, I was banned from driving for three weeks and was released from home on January 2.
I was extremely fortunate that my ban took place over the Christmas period as I wasn’t in any mood for go out celebrating in any case. However, it was a torturous process right from the start. It all began on August 30, 2022, when I received a traumatised phone call from my brother, just outside London, asking me to get to him as soon as was physically possible, because his wife was in horrendous pain, and he didn’t know what to do.
So, I immediately dropped everything, got in the car and went. As it turned out, his wife’s colon had burst and I managed to get the ambulance bumped up to a ‘red alert’ call, which meant that it did save her life, albeit not for very long as she passed away on September 12.
Whilst helping my brother, who was also terminally ill, I got another phone call telling me that my husband had had a bad fall and had a severe head injury, so I had to rush back to Torquay on September 6. Naturally, I was not in the best frame of mind on either trip as I was worried sick about all the members of my family, which of course now, very sadly only numbers one. Well, my crimes were not heinous, but I had broken the law, if not the national speed limit. I was caught in a variable speed area on both occasions between Junctions 15 to 17 on the M5.
Going up, it was 69mph in a 60 limit and coming back 64mph in a 50 limit. Anyone who travels this piece of road regularly knows that the speed limit changes from 70 to 60 to 50, and back, with mind spinning speed and clearly has nothing to do with either safety or roadworks. Incidentally, these two cameras are reported to be the biggest cash cows in the UK.
I have to confess to you, that I already had some points on my driving licence, therefore another six would have given me an automatic ban of six months. So, I contacted Freeman & Co, the lawyers known for uncovering loopholes in evidence. Then the process began. In total, I was bounced from court three times. Once on Zoom and twice after having waited for two hours and then being told that the court didn’t have the time to hear the case particularly, as we were arguing ‘exceptional hardship’. I was relying on a barrister to put my case for me to hopefully get the best possible outcome, but that also meant that each time the case was bounced, I had another set of fees to pay for both him and the solicitor. It is an expensive business!
Heartless as it sounds, when we did get to court, the three judges (yes three!) decided that I couldn’t claim ‘exceptional hardship’ anymore because my brother had passed away a couple of weeks before and therefore, I didn’t need to assist him any further with hospital trips, etc. I was actually in the dock for two hours, as the judges had to keep leaving to take legal advice on my case. After all this, the outcome was a relief, but the process was shocking. Under any circumstances, this was not a serious crime. It was not driving without due care and attention or drink driving, and yet the man-hours spent on it for over a year by the courts was surely counter-productive to their workload.
Added to this I have no complaint of the law in general, but I do question the process, and also the use of the massive funds that they raise via the fines, speed awareness courses, road tax and anything else they can think of to tax the motorist. And yet, none of these riches, and it is a huge amount, seem to be spent on sorting out the dreadful and extremely dangerous potholes across the country.
There are now even more ways for those in power to chip away at the pockets of the drivers by bringing in the ridiculous 20mph limits in the name of stopping climate change. Really? In the UK we are responsible for one per cent of the global emissions, which is claimed not to have any impact whatsoever on anything in particular. The obsession with penalising drivers in the UK and changing us all to electric cars has become a little mind boggling and overly zealous. Particularly as it has now been proven that the batteries in electric cars have a far more negative effect on global warming than petrol guzzling automobiles.
I know I broke the law, it was a fair cop, and I am sorry for that. But surely the driving laws need to have better reasoning behind them. If the decision is to fine us all and to keep finding more ways to do so, then find a productive way to spend the ill-gotten gains. As of now, I have no idea where all the money goes or what it is used for, because clearly it is not making the roads safer.