A pensioner struggling to cope with household bills has been convicted by a fast-track court of a motoring offence after she accidentally got one letter wrong on her car insurance papers.
The 86-year-old woman, from York, accidentally put down an F instead of an S when registering her number plate with Swinton Insurance.
Unaware of the mistake, she assumed she had been complying with the law and paid for a year’s worth of cover for her Suzuki Splash car.
But the pensioner realised her error after a letter from the DVLA came through the door revealing that she was facing a criminal prosecution for keeping a vehicle without insurance.
In a desperate bid to avoid conviction, she wrote to magistrates explaining her mistake along with her niece, who penned a letter saying that the family was stepping in to help as they ‘did not know it had got to the stage where she can’t cope’.
However the controversial Single Justice Procedure (SJP), which sees magistrates hand out convictions and punishments in private hearings, ultimately fast-tracked the woman’s conviction.
The scheme has proven problematic in recent years with numerous wrongful prosecutions handed out, including charges against people who are ill or have died.
Yet still it persists, with hundreds of prosecutions handed down in the United Kingdom every single week.
The 86-year-old pensioner’s letter to the SJP read: ‘I understood my car was fully insured with Swinton Insurance, from April 1 2025 to March 31 2026.
‘I did not notice the registration printed wrongly had an F instead of an S.’
While her niece penned: ‘All the paperwork for insurance has been found to be one letter incorrect.
‘No-one had picked up on this. I am now helping her with her paperwork as we (the family) did not know it had got to the stage where she can’t cope.
‘She has tried to complete the form as best as possible.’
The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency said it will contact the woman to check her insurance paperwork and will seek to have the conviction overturned if the registration typo was indeed to blame.
The SJP was invented in 2015 as a cheaper way of handling low-level criminal cases, allowing a magistrate sitting alone in private to take decisions instead of three magistrates deliberating together in open court.
Cases are decided based on written evidence alone, and there is no prosecutor present to see the mitigation and other correspondence sent in by the defendant.
The design of the fast-track process means prosecutors are unable to review new evidence that has come to light, or take a decision to withdraw a case that is no longer in the public interest.
In the pensioner’s case, David Pollard, a magistrate sitting at Teesside Magistrates’ Court, opted to accept the written guilty plea and impose a conviction, rather than asking the DVLA to do further checks on the public interest in the prosecution.
He sentenced her to a three-month conditional discharge instead of a fine, but also ordered her to pay a £26 victim surcharge.
It comes after a 51-year-old woman was last month convicted in the SJP courts over a £35 bill on her dead husband’s car which went unpaid in the weeks after he passed.
The anonymous woman was taken to court by the DVLA over the slip-up, which happened last July when she was in mourning and arranging her husband’s funeral.
She wrote a letter explaining she does not drive herself, has never owned a car, and mistakenly did not pay £35.84 in vehicle tax on her husband’s Jaguar car when it came into her possession after his death.
But her tragic circumstances were not enough to avoid a criminal conviction, after the case was brought through the SJP courts.
She was sentenced to a six-month conditional discharge with an order to pay £85 in costs and the £35.84 car tax bill.
Amid complaints and media coverage over such convictions, The Labour Government conducted a consultation on possible changes to the Single Justice Procedure system between March and May last year.
However so far no plan for change has emerged.
Yet the Lady Chief Justice Baroness Carr revealed at her annual press conference in March that Lord Justice Green, the Senior Presiding Judge for England and Wales, is leading a ‘nuts and bolts audit’ of the Single Justice Procedure.
A working group, comprising of judges, magistrates, and justice officials, ‘will soon conclude’ the audit, the Judicial Office said, with recommendations set to go to the Interim Magistrates Executive Board.
