New technology has seen a fall in the number of road tax offences in Ireland

A fall by 5,000 in the number of road tax offences has led to the Gardai hailing the new hi-tech licence plate reader as a success in tackling motorists driving on Ireland’s roads without paying for tax, which is a legal requirement.

Established in late 2008, the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) system is able to read five different licence plates in just one second.
The Gardai released figures that showed the number of recorded road tax offences had dropped to 70,579 for 2009, compared with 75,307 incidents in 2008. The offences included in the figures were for no tax, failure to display and failure to produce.

A spokesperson for the Gardai believed that the drop in offences was because of the improved technology and a greater awareness from the public, saying, “Obviously, the decline in offences is linked to greater compliance on the part of the general public. There has been no reduction on the level of activity on our part, but with the technological improvements we have made, people now realise they can’t afford to take risks.”

Although the decline in offences has been seen as progress, Environment Minister John Gormley wants to tighten the laws even further. In a statement that was circulated with the Carbon Budget in December, Mr Gormley insisted there were serious issues surrounding car tax enforcement that had to be addressed.

He believes there is a perception that vehicles can be driven in public areas if the tax is only a month out of date and wants to see legislation introduced to end this tolerance to out-of-date tax. Mr Gormley also has concerns about the system of declaring vehicles off the road. He would like to see this tightening significantly, so motorists who do pay their tax on time are not disadvantaged by those that appear to abuse the system.

The encouraging figures from the Gardai come following a study that showed thousands of road users in Ireland have stopped or were thinking of stopping paying for their insurance. This is a real worry, especially for commercial vehicle operators, where it is not uncommon to see a company insuring vans and trucks just to get the insurance certificate and then cancelling the policy.

Online hire operator Vanrentals.ie has seen a rise in this practice over the last 24 months and now has implemented a quarterly review of long term lease customers insurance policies.

The report revealed that 25 per cent of people that had decided to cancel insurance payments had stopped motor insurance, even though it is a legal necessity to have it to drive on Irish roads.

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