Uninsured driving: convictions rose 7% in 2025 after a decade of decline

Convictions for using a vehicle without insurance rose in 2025 for the first time in four years. Court data for England and Wales records 76,983 of them, up 7.0% on 2024, after a decade in which the annual total had fallen by a third.

The national picture

Convictions under section 143 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 fell for most of the past fifteen years, from 110,250 in 2010 to a low point in 2021, then levelled off before turning up again last year.

Year	Convictions	Average fine	Disqualified
2010	110,250	£285	16.1%
2019	82,300 (approx.)	Not stated	Not stated
2024	71,950 (approx.)	Not stated	Not stated
2025	76,983	£467	21.9%

The 2025 total is still 6.5% below 2019, so this is a rise within a long decline rather than a return to where things were. Of those convicted last year, 97.5% were fined and 21.9% were disqualified, both shares higher than in 2010.

Average fines have risen about 64% since 2010 in cash terms, which is a little ahead of inflation over the same period. That still leaves the typical fine below the typical cost of being insured: £467 against an average private motor premium of £566 in the second quarter of 2026. A conviction also brings six points or a ban, and a far higher premium afterwards, but the headline numbers do not make the deterrent obvious.

Convictions by police force area

Dividing each force area’s convictions by the number of vehicles licensed there gives a rate that can be compared between places. The spread is sevenfold.

Rank	Force area	Per 10,000 vehicles	Convictions	Change on 2024	Average fine
1	Metropolitan Police	59.4	17,895	+27.5%	£474
2	West Yorkshire	40.5	5,610	+22.4%	£461
3	Northamptonshire	38.2	2,077	+37.9%	£508
4	South Yorkshire	30.7	2,392	+14.1%	£454
5	Cleveland	28.9	914	+6.5%	£438
6	Lancashire	26.3	2,436	down 6.3%	£479
7	Nottinghamshire	26.3	1,720	down 3.1%	£484
8	Kent	25.7	3,079	down 1.0%	£474
9	Merseyside	25.4	1,845	+7.1%	£435
10	Northumbria	24.5	1,861	+2.1%	£441
38	Bedfordshire	9.5	423	Not shown	£454
39	Cumbria	9.3	339	Not shown	£500
40	Surrey	9.1	737	Not shown	£441
41	Devon and Cornwall	8.8	1,145	Not shown	£444
42	Thames Valley	8.4	2,009	Not shown	£485

The ten highest and five lowest of 42 forces. The largest annual increases were in Cambridgeshire, up 77.7%, Gloucestershire up 74.9%, Hampshire up 73.1%, Gwent up 65.3% and Wiltshire up 52.0%. Average fines ranged from £514 in Cambridgeshire to £370 in South Wales.

What the rate does and does not show

Three things are worth holding in mind before reading the table as a league table of lawlessness.

• 1

  It is the court, not the driver

  Convictions are counted at the force area of the court that passed sentence, not where the offence happened or where the driver lives. Single Justice Procedure cases can be heard well away from either.

• 2

  It measures enforcement too

  A conviction only exists if someone was caught and prosecuted. London's position reflects the scale of automatic number plate recognition there as much as the behaviour of its drivers.

• 3

  The denominator is residents' vehicles

  Dividing by vehicles registered in the area understates places with heavy through traffic, where many of the vehicles on the road are registered somewhere else.

Why police records show fewer offences than courts show convictions

Police recorded 60,054 insurance offences in 2024 and sent 65.8% of them to court, which works out at about 39,500 cases. The courts convicted roughly 71,950 people that year. More convictions than cases sent to court looks like an error, and it is the first thing a careful reader will query.

It is not an error, but the two figures do not describe the same thing. The Home Office series counts what police did with offences they recorded. The Ministry of Justice series counts defendants whose cases concluded in court, including prosecutions that never began with a police notice, and cases concluded in one year that began in another. Neither series is designed to reconcile with the other, and adding or subtracting them produces a number that means nothing.

The practical reading is narrower than it looks: police data tells you about enforcement activity, court data tells you about outcomes, and only the court data supports the per-area comparison above.

Checked against our own licensing data

The rates in the table depend on a denominator, and a denominator is easy to get wrong. We hold Department for Transport vehicle licensing data for the same geographies, so the Metropolitan Police figure can be tested directly.

• 59.4per 10,000 vehicles, the published figure for the Met area
• 58.6recalculated from our own licensing data for London
• 1.3%apart, which a year's growth in the vehicle fleet accounts for

London had 3,052,997 licensed vehicles at the end of June 2026 on our figures. Seventeen thousand eight hundred and ninety five convictions against that base is 58.6 per 10,000 rather than 59.4, and the difference is explained by the analysis using a 2025 vehicle count against our mid-2026 one. The Metropolitan Police area and Greater London are also not quite the same thing, since the City of London has its own force. The method holds up.

Seizures: the figure nobody holds

Police may seize a vehicle driven without insurance under section 165A of the Road Traffic Act. It is the sanction drivers notice most, because recovering a car costs money immediately and an unclaimed one is disposed of.

There is no national total. A freedom of information request by the AA put seizures at 542,370 between 2018 and September 2022. In a written answer in November 2025, the Home Office confirmed that it does not collect seizure figures centrally, so the series stops there. How many vehicles are taken each year, how many are reclaimed and how many are crushed are all unknown at national level.

Related UK Motoring data

The licensed vehicle counts used as the denominator above sit on our area statistics pages, alongside MOT pass rates by area for the same geographies. Vehicle age is a useful companion measure when comparing force areas, since older vehicle stock is associated with both MOT failure and the economic pressures that make a lapsed policy more likely. Our road safety data covers collisions and casualties on the same geographies.

Operation Drive Insured, the Motor Insurers’ Bureau and police enforcement week, runs from 10 to 16 November 2026.

Sources

• Ministry of Justice, Criminal Justice System statistics quarterly: Outcomes by Offence data tool, offence code 80901, 2010 to 2025.
• Home Office, Police Powers and Procedures: fixed penalty notices and other outcomes, classification 809, 2011 to 2024.
• Department for Transport, vehicle licensing statistics, table VEH0105, 2025, and UK Motoring’s own licensing figures to the end of June 2026.
• Association of British Insurers, Motor Insurance Premium Tracker, second quarter of 2026, published 29 July 2026.
• AA, freedom of information request on section 165A seizures, 2018 to September 2022.
• Home Office, written answer PQ 93061, November 2025, on the absence of central seizure figures.