When I moved back to the UK from Spain last year, two things struck me.
Every British city centre smells of weed. Brits are angry, and they are at their angriest behind the wheel of a car.
I have written before about how the UK quietly decriminalised weed. Theresa May cut police budgets, police forces had to prioritise and, one by one, they stopped chasing people for a whiff of the spliff. Cannabis remained illegal, but in practice, in much of the country, smoking it stopped being something the police were particularly interested in. The epidemic of bad driving and road rage was harder to explain.
I think I may now have stumbled across part of the answer. We have quietly done something rather similar with bad driving.
A few weeks ago I was involved in a minor road traffic collision on the A690 in Durham. I was sitting in stationary traffic when another vehicle came down the wrong side of the road and hit the side of the van I was driving. Nobody was hurt and, although inconvenient, the damage wasn’t particularly serious.
I reported it to Durham Police. I wasn’t expecting flashing blue lights and a team of detectives, but I did rather naively assume that when someone reported an apparent driving offence which had resulted in a collision, the police would at least be interested in whether an offence had been committed. They weren’t. Their initial response was remarkably straightforward:
“As you have the registration number of the other vehicle, we will be taking no further action.”
The explanation was that my insurance company could identify the owner from the registration number and the insurance companies could sort out liability between themselves. I pointed out that I wasn’t simply reporting an insurance claim. I was alleging that a driving offence had taken place. Their response was considerably more interesting:
“It is our force policy that if the offending vehicle registration is known and they have valid insurance, then the insurance companies deal with any claim.”
The important words here are “force policy”. This wasn’t, according to Durham Police, simply an individual officer deciding that my particular case wasn’t worth pursuing. I was being told that there was a policy: if the registration of the offending vehicle is known and the vehicle is insured, the insurance companies deal with it. Which is where things start to get a little strange.
Whether somebody is insured has nothing to do with whether they have committed a driving offence. Insurance companies can argue about who pays for a dented van, but they cannot investigate or prosecute careless or dangerous driving. More importantly, Durham Police weren’t telling me that they had looked at the evidence and decided that no offence had been committed. They were telling me that because the vehicle could be identified and was insured, the police weren’t going to investigate. And apparently this wasn’t simply a judgement about one minor collision. They told me it was force policy.
Except Durham Police also has another approach to bad driving. It is called Operation Snap.
Operation Snap actively encourages members of the public to send Durham Police footage of bad driving. The footage goes to the roads policing unit, where it is reviewed and action can be taken. Last year Durham Police even produced a compilation of some of the drivers caught through the scheme. Its Casualty Reduction Co-ordinator, Pete Tate, explained that everyone has the right to use the roads safely and that this means “identifying dangerous drivers and dealing with them accordingly”. His final message to motorists couldn’t have been much clearer: “If you spot something, tell us.”
This isn’t some peripheral activity dreamed up by an enthusiastic officer either. Road safety is one of the explicit priorities set for Durham Police by its elected Police and Crime Commissioner. Joy Allen’s Police, Crime and Justice Plan has six overarching themes and one of them is Safer Roads. When the current plan came into force in April 2025, Allen said road safety would “remain a key area of focus”, specifically mentioning speeding and drink and drug driving alongside stronger enforcement.
In January this year she went further. Road safety, she said, “is not a minor issue”. It is central to the Safer Roads commitment in her Police, Crime and Justice Plan and to her ambition of achieving Vision Zero — ultimately reaching the point where nobody dies on County Durham’s roads. Nor is this just rhetoric from a local politician. Allen is Joint National Lead for Roads Policing for the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners. When she was appointed to the role, her office said it would put her “at the forefront of road safety in the UK”.
As recently as August she was calling for stronger legislation, better education and “robust enforcement” against dangerous driving behaviours, arguing that stronger enforcement required sustained investment in roads policing. In other words, this is an area in which Durham’s PCC has been unusually vocal, locally and nationally.
So we have a puzzle. Durham Police encourages the public to report bad driving. Its Police and Crime Commissioner has made safer roads a policing priority. The force operates a scheme specifically designed to turn evidence supplied by ordinary motorists into enforcement action, while its PCC campaigns nationally for tougher enforcement of driving laws.
And yet Durham Police had just told me that it was “force policy” that, where the offending vehicle is identifiable and insured, the matter is left to insurance companies.
So I asked to see the policy. If I had misunderstood what the officer meant by “force policy”, Durham Police could tell me. If the officer had simply described the policy incorrectly, Durham Police could correct the record.
So, before writing this article, I approached both Durham Police and the Police and Crime Commissioner and asked them to explain the apparent contradiction. The PCC’s office didn’t respond. Durham Police did, but they wouldn’t give me the policy. Instead, I was told that if I wanted a copy of the policy which Durham Police themselves had cited as the reason for taking no further action, I would have to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
This seems an extraordinarily convoluted way of answering a very simple question. I wasn’t asking for operational intelligence, personal information or details of an ongoing investigation. I was asking Durham Police to show me the “force policy” which Durham Police had already relied upon in correspondence with me.
Perhaps the eventual FOI response will clear everything up. Perhaps there is a perfectly sensible policy which reconciles Durham’s approach to collisions with Operation Snap, the PCC’s Safer Roads priority and all those exhortations to the public to report dangerous driving. But we shouldn’t need an FOI request to find out.
Which brings me back to weed. Cannabis wasn’t decriminalised by Parliament. The law remained on the statute book. What changed was enforcement. Faced with limited resources and competing priorities, police forces increasingly decided that there were other things they would rather spend their time doing.
I am not suggesting that Durham Police has literally decriminalised careless or dangerous driving. Those remain criminal offences. The question is whether something similar has happened in practice. If behaviour remains illegal, but the circumstances in which the police will investigate it become progressively narrower, the distinction between something being illegal and something being tolerated begins to matter rather a lot.
Careless driving remains an offence. Dangerous driving remains an offence. Durham Police encourages us to report bad driving and its Police and Crime Commissioner says safer roads are a priority. But Durham Police has also told me that there is a “force policy” under which at least some reported incidents are instead handed to insurance companies to sort out.
Some stoner sitting on a beanbag listening Pink Floyd and having a toke is a bit different to someone in a fury hurtling around in a few tons of fast moving metal.
We are entitled to know what that policy says, what offences it covers and how widely it is applied. Because there is quite a difference between having laws against bad driving and actually policing them.
Which would explain why going to Sainsburys to buy a loaf of bread means facing endless angry people in huge vehicles driving dangerously.
Update. The Police and Crime Commissioner has responded:
“Road safety is a priority for me both locally and through my national roads policing portfolio. I understand the strength of feeling that can arise when members of the public report incidents they believe place road users at risk. However, decisions about whether a particular incident is investigated are operational matters for the Chief Constable.
The Force base decision on the level of threat and risk, the severity of the incident, the evidence available which can be uploaded as part of Operation SNAP, legal requirements and the proportionate use of police resources, including whether the incident is reported at the time or at a later point.
My role is to hold the Chief Constable to account for the effectiveness of policing services, including roads policing, and to ensure that the Constabulary is applying legislation, national guidance and local policy appropriately and consistently.”