Car seized by police- odd one

Car_54

voluted said:

1jim said:

Okell said:

1jim said:

Okell said:

Seems to me this isn't about whether she was entitled to drive but rather about whether or not she can produce the required documents within the prescribed timescale.

@1jim - I'd start a thread over on FTLA pronto/ASAP if I were you:   Speeding and other criminal offences

(I say "if I were you" but it would be much better if your daughter posted herself.  For obvious reasons they can't be bothered wasting their time on "send three and fourpence we're going to a dance" scenarios... )

all sorted- she saw same officer by chance at the station who helped her with this
same documents produced and reviewed and car now ok to be released
reiterated that he didnt want to take car but was instructed to.

suspect a very unusual situation and somone in control room hadnt come across before. Thanks for the link to that board- didnt know was there 

Taking account of what you've said above - and also @TooManyPoints comments, - I'd be inclined to make a formal complaint against which ever police officer created this situation.

My initial view was that your daughter should have acted more promptly in getting her provisional licence converted to a full licence, but if it's true* that she needed to retain her provisional licence for ID purposes, then the reporting officer ought to have taken that into account at the appropriate stage of the process.


*  Of course if she didn't need to retain her provisional licence for ID purposes then this falls on her.  As a retired NHS manager who used to have some responsibility for student nurses, I can't stress how important it is for nurses to know traffic law...

I dont disagree about acting more promptly, however she has 2 years to exchange the certificate- if she sends off the certificate tomorrow what would there be to stop a similar incident/event occurring in 2 days time?  if there is a time limit imposed, as long as she exchanges within the time frame she is compliant with the law.  Im not sure what traffic law you think she has contravened?

as a current nurse and nhs manager i wouldnt be inclined to make any complaint against public service- we can all make mistakes 

There's nothing to stop her from getting involved in a similar incident even 2 seconds after she posts her licence off, no, but statistically, the longer she waits to send it off, the more likely she is to be involved in a similar incident.

Isn't the opposite the case? New drivers are notoriously accident prone, so the chance of an "incident" in a given period (a week?) actually diminishes as she gains experience.

Conversely, the chance of an incident happening while she is still clutching her pass certificate does indeed increase. with time. But she would be rather unfortunate to encounter such an ill-informed police sergeant again.

mills705

After an accident the police are sometimes known to do a statutory recovery of the vehicle instead of leaving you to arrange the recovery at your pleasure they may have decided to get the vehicle off the road as it posed a danger to other motorists. 
The insurer/ owner is responsible to pay this fee to get the vehicle out of the compound but it is all meant for safety and not to do with the needing of documents. Not sure on how these vehicles are released though. 

voluted

TooManyPoints said:

 In being stopped for not having a valid full licence, which would effect ins etc. 

How would it?

but it's also potentially making a rod for her own back if she does so.

You seem to be making the same mistake as the police officer who unlawfully seized her car.

She was driving perfectly legally. She was licensed to drive, had the necessary entitlement to do so and held (and produced at the roadside) the documents she needed to prove it. She had committed no offence. Why should she take steps to avoid the police doing something which they had no power to do?

Because she doesn't want to faff around taking her documents into the station again?

I'm not making a mistake at all, I'm well aware of "her rights." I'm also considerably more pragmatic and understand that there are hills to die on, this not being one of them.

TooManyPoints

After an accident the police are sometimes known to do a statutory recovery of the vehicle....

I don't think was a statutory recovery:

it seems that they want her to produce full licence at police station before they will release car

I'm also considerably more pragmatic and understand that there are hills to die on, this not being one of them.

But this was not of her making. She did nothing wrong. She knew she had two years in which to exchange her licence. When she decided not to exchange it (for whatever reason) she could hardly have envisaged that she would encounter a police officer deciding to act unlawfully (whether because of ignorance or not) by seizing her car.

It's not a question of choosing a hill to die on. She had no choice in the matter. I am no police basher, but this was a disgraceful episode. As if seizing her car unlawfully was not bad enough, they went on to ask her to produce something which they knew she did not have, which they knew or should have known she had no chance of obtaining in the time they allowed and which she had no requirement to hold anyway.

I really don't understand how you can suggest she chose this particular hill to die on.

Flugelhorn

100% of the new drivers in this household couldn't wait to get their new licences so left their provisional licences with the examiner and a new sparkly driving licence appeared within days - meanwhile they pottered around for a few days with the pass cert.

TooManyPoints

Their actions make little sense ...

I completely agree. 

"...and probably wouldn't make sense when presented to the chief officer at the scene."

Whether it made sense to him is neither here nor there. He's not empowered to make sense of decisions which people take within the the law, only to enforce the law when they break it.

If we're to discuss the officer's sense, if he had used any he would have realised that whatever documents she held or did not hold, she had not contravened s87(1) - which she needed to have done to give him the powers to seize her car. He should have known, or a least worked out if he did not know, that she had not contravened that section and her making what many might consider a strange or unusual decision did not trump that and empower him to seize her car.

But what you are saying is that she shouldn't moan after encountering a police officer who didn't know the law and acted contrary to it, because she took (what we both consider) an irrational - although entirely lawful - decision some months earlier. 

In short, she complied with the law, the officer didn't, but by your reckoning she's the architect of her own misfortune and deserved all she got. I think I'll leave it at that because we obviously have different ideas of what's right and what's wrong.

BTW, I have no "learning difficulties" but thanks for the consideration.

Mildly_Miffed

I'm not sure the police have made an unlawful decision.

They were presented with a driver with a provisional licence (which checked out with DVLA) and what was claimed to be a pass certificate dated a year ago, which could not be verified at the roadside in the dark.

They took the decision to impound the vehicle until it could be examined at the police station to confirm whether it was genuine or not and to confirm its validity. The vehicle could not, I presume, be driven anyway - so it's a question of whether the driver arranged recovery to remove it from the ditch or the police did.

Given the unusual situation of somebody not having changed it, this does not seem unlawful nor excessively unreasonable.

TooManyPoints

I'm not sure the police have made an unlawful decision.

I am. In fact, the more I examine this the more certain I am.

.... and what was claimed to be a pass certificate dated a year ago, which could not be verified at the roadside in the dark.

I assume they had torches or a light in their car. Then, having seen it, they would have to have reasonable grounds to believe it was fake or invalid; it should not be assumed to be so until it can be verified.  So what reasonable grounds would they have for that? She is a student nurse (which, since she was on her way home from work, no doubt she could substantiate). She had business insurance to allow her to drive in connection with that work. If she wanted to drive with no ‘L’ plates and no supervisor she could simply do so. Why would she commit the far more serious offence of presenting a forged document to the police? The logical extension to this is than anybody driving on a provisional licence and pass certificate - however long ago they passed their test, subject to the two year limit -  is liable to have his vehicle seized until the police are satisfied his certificate is genuine. That would clearly be a nonsense.

In any case, there is no suggestion that the police suspected the certificate was not  valid. Quite the reverse, in fact.

...so it's a question of whether the driver arranged recovery to remove it from the ditch or the police did.

I don’t think there is any question of that at all:

"they accept she can legally drive and that has full insurance, mot etc etc and are not taking any action against her for anything.....

however they have still seized the car- they have asked that she produce a full license in 7 days"

and:

"...she was given a producer but the police told her they were seizing it under road traffic act"

Why did they ask her to produce something which they knew she couldn’t? Possibly because of this:

…but the officer agreed that he could see evidence of the provision license, the pass certificate, insurance and mot etc so was happy that she hadnt done anything wrong- but said his sergeant wanted the car seized until she could produce a full license (as it still shows on provisional on the computer)

This is utter lunacy. Never mind what the sergeant wanted. He wasn't there. Since he insisted on her producing something he knows she does not have and cannot readily obtain, the rest of his judgement must be treated cautiously. The officer who made the seizure was happy that no offence had been committed. 

There are only two offences  which can lead to seizure and if the officer (at the scene who was doing the seizing, not his sergeant back at the nick) had no reasonable grounds to believe that either had been committed he had no powers to seize the car. If he does, that seizure is unlawful. It’s as simple as that and I have no doubt (based on what the OP has told us and which I take at face value) that this particular seizure was unlawful.

molerat

You cannot honestly say she has needed the provisional for ID for the whole of the past year so at what stage will she decide she doesn't need it and it is time to send it off ?  Leave it until 2 weeks before the 2 years is up and when it gets lost in the post it will be too late to do anything about it ?  Sending it off now, after making a copy of some sort of both the licence and pass cert, will at least afford her the time to sort it out if anything goes wrong.  Just because you can legally do something it does not necessarily follow it is the sensible thing to do.

Aretnap

TooManyPoints said:

.... and what was claimed to be a pass certificate dated a year ago, which could not be verified at the roadside in the dark.

I assume they had torches or a light in their car. Then, having seen it, they would have to have reasonable grounds to believe it was fake or invalid; it should not be assumed to be so until it can be verified.  So what reasonable grounds would they have for that? 

I don't actually think that part even matters. The power to seize a vehicle exists if and only if (a) the driver fails to produce his licence and (b) the officer has reasonable grounds for believing that the person was driving unlicenced.

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/52/section/165A

If the OP's daughter produced a valid licence (a provisional one, made valid by the pass certificate) then what the officer believed, reasonably or otherwise, doesn't come into it - the seizure was unlawful.

Pryor v Greater Manchester Police touches on this. In that case the driver produced an insurance certificate which the police wrongly thought didn't cover his use of the vehicle. To confirm their suspicions they phoned the insurance company and were told that he wasn't covered, so they seized the vehicle. As it turned out, the person they spoke to at the insurance company was an idiot, but they didn't know that. The Court of Appeal found that as the driver had produced a valid insurance certificate they had acted unlawfully - the fact that they (reasonably) believed that it wasn't valid didn't change that.

The take home message seems to be that if a driver produces what operates to be a valid licence or insurance certificate, if the police believe that it is not valid and want to seize the car anyway they had better be damn sure that they are right,  because if they turn out to be wrong they will always have acted unlawfully. The power to take someone's car away from then is quite rightly limited and applies only in very specific circumstances. There's no general power to seize a vehicle because they believe that someone might be unlicenced, and still less because it all seems a bit complicated and it would be a lot of time and effort to check.