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Some info about driving bans, points and fines etc following a lot of discussion about it recently. If you know any different please do reply to this thread!

There is a big cross-border initiative to try and stop non-resident drivers and drivers with foreign licences from escaping points and bans etc. At the moment you cannot receive/lose points from any country other than the one which issued your licence. If you lose your licence in one country is does not affect your ability to drive in another country on their licence if you have one. It would appear, certainly in the UK that if you commit an offence but have no UK licence then a ‘ghost licence’ is set up in your name upon which you collect points. This only has an effect if you subsequently applied for a UK licence, when these points would be applied to your new licence. If you never apply for a UK licence you’d never get the points! The same appears to be true in France. However, you can be banned from driving in France by the authorities physically removing your licence from you, returning it by post at the end of the ban!

(see www.policespecials.com...opic=91255 and www.anglophone-direct....st-NOT-to)


There are three main projects set up to counter this. The Sparks Project aims to stop non-UK nationals from not having to pay fines and congestion charges. Their website has a lot of information about current legislatory progress – basically 2011/12 at the earliest for cross-border enforcement! (http://www.sparksproject.org)

Eucaris is attempting to facilitate cross-border exchange of vehicle registration details. At present there is a trial in place to exchange data between France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Luxembourg and Austria. There is no sign yet of UK/France exchanges. (http://www.eucaris.net)

VERA is the EU response to cross-border enforcement. At present the parliament is up to VERA3 in specification terms, but there is little prospect of progress in the near future. There is talk of a new EU licence from 2013 – so it may be worth ensuring you renew a national one before then! (The website at www.vera3.eu/ won’t seem to load for me..)

There is an interesting newsletter here - www.tecmagazine.com/ma...07_23.pdf. It’s dated 2007 but I cannot find evidence that anything has changed other than the EU parliament agreed in principle in December 2008 to organise a common approach to traffic enforcement. However, an answer to a question posed in February 2009 shows this is still some way off: www.europarl.europa.eu...y=QUESTION

So, to summarise, Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

PS None of the information in this post can be considered as definitive – do your own research too!
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