More foreign speeders to get fines but not Britons
Drivers from 17 countries will get fines in the post if they are caught by speed cameras... but UK drivers will still escape.
France has signed deals with three new countries to penalise cross-border offences but no deal has been done with the UK.
Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania now share car registration details with France and owners from there – plus French owners caught in the 17 countries – may now be sent fine notices for driving offences. These include speeding, no seatbelt, ignoring lights, motorcyclists not wearing a helmet, driving down no-entry roads or using a mobile.
Around a fifth of cars flashed in France are foreign-registered and half of cars flashed during the summer.
Information sharing is aimed at cracking down on this, and has been steadily rolled out with more than half of the EU countries following a directive agreed in 2015.
Offenders receive fine notices in their own language and a second is sent if no payment is made. If there is still no payment the offence stays on a database and the driver would be forced to pay immediately if ever stopped by police in France.
Countries with which France has no agreement yet are mostly distant from its borders, such as Sweden, Finland, Croatia and Greece but the UK is the exception – and a French Interior Ministry spokesman said the UK had not wanted to put an agreement in place.
A British Department for Transport spokesman said this was because Britain only fines the driver in road offences and the EU directive does not contain a legal mechanism to compel owners of foreign-registered cars to say who was driving, unlike when a British-registered car is flashed in the UK.
In France the registered owner is fined unless they provide name and address and driving licence number of the person who was driving instead.
However, UK drivers do not escape punishment if caught in person by police or gendarmes – as with two British bikers flashed at 204kph on an 80kph road in Pas de Calais in July.
Their licences were confiscated, bikes impounded and they were banned from French roads for several months.
Meanwhile, road death figures in France for June show a 9.3% drop, or 30 fewer deaths, compared to June last year.
