New road safety minister was fined three times for speeding
THE government’s new road safety minister came close to being disqualified from driving after he was caught speeding three times within three years.
Stephen Ladyman, who was appointed last week, has admitted that at one stage he had accumulated nine penalty points on his driving licence. If he had been caught speeding for a fourth time — adding a further three points — he would have faced an automatic ban.
Ladyman, who is deputy to Alistair Darling, the transport secretary, oversees roads policy and is tasked with ensuring the safe passage of a road safety bill through parliament. The bill, which ran out of time before the general election was called, will be reintroduced in the Queen’s speech this week.
It proposes a shake-up of the penalty points system, meaning that drivers who are caught travelling marginally over a 30mph limit may have their licences endorsed with two points instead of the present three.
It has also emerged that Ladyman, 52, called for a cap on speed cameras last year. He told a local newspaper in Kent: “What I don’t think we should be doing is putting them up here, there and everywhere as a way of raising revenue. I think there’s enough already.”
Yesterday Ladyman said: “I still don’t dissent from that view. One of my responsibilities is going to be to review speed cameras and the way they are being used, and that gives you an indication of the way my mind will be working when I look at it.”
Ladyman last broke the speed limit by about 10mph in 2002 as he was driving on the A2 from London to his South Thanet constituency in Kent. He still has three points on his licence as a result of the offence and would have paid a £60 fine.
The six points he acquired from the other two speeding offences — picked up at roadworks on the M2 — are now “spent” because they were incurred more than three years ago.
When Ladyman first revealed his speeding convictions to the Kent on Sunday newspaper, he described them as “three silly lapses of judgment”.
Yesterday he said: “Politicians are human and have the same frailties as everyone else. The speed cameras worked. I was careless, I got caught and now I’m much more careful. That’s exactly what they are supposed to achieve.”
The number of speeding fines imposed on drivers in England and Wales has soared from about 260,000 in 1996 to 1.8m in 2003. Last year Britain’s 6,000 speed camera sites generated £20m.
Ladyman’s offences have dismayed road safety campaigners. “A basic requirement for a road safety minister should be a clean driving licence,” said Mary Williams, chief executive of Brake, a road safety charity.
Ladyman, who drives an Alfa Romeo 156, is not the first high-profile politician to have been caught speeding.
In 2003 Harriet Harman, then solicitor-general and now a constitutional affairs minister, was banned from driving for seven days and fined £400 for travelling at 99mph on the M4 in Wiltshire.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0, ... 48,00.html
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