Speeding Offences

Speeding Offences

If you are facing prosecution for any type of motoring offence, we can help. We are an established firm of solicitors with a wealth of experience in defending motoring offences and criminal charges.

Most minor speeding offences are simply dealt with by the issuing of penalty points and a small fine. In more serious cases, or where you already have substantial penalty points on your licence, you may be disqualified or even face a charge of dangerous driving if the speed is excessive.

If you are facing this type of situation contact us to speak to one of our motoring offences solicitors for advice on your case.

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Penalties for speeding

Even if you currently have no points you may still face a ban from driving in some cases. Magistrates have discretion to impose bans from 14 days up to a usual maximum of 1 year if your offence has aggravating circumstances, such as if you were driving at very high speed, were substantially over the speed limit or were causing danger to other road users. If you have points on your licence and a further offence would mean you having 12 or more points on your licence, you may face an automatic disqualification under the "totting up" rules.

In these cases you may be able to defend against a ban if you can show mitigating circumstances or prove that the evidence against you is faulty. Our solicitors have experience in evaluating such evidence.

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Defence for speeding offences

A successful plea of mitigating circumstances may lead to a lesser penalty, or disqualification not being imposed. Defence can fall into two categories.

• Special reasons. This is where although you may be guilty of the offence you have a reason which could be taken into consideration by the court, for example if you were speeding to help someone who was in danger.
• Exceptional hardship. All driving bans are likely to cause hardship; you have to be able to convince the court that the imposition of a ban would cause that hardship to be exceptional to you or someone else.

Please see our pages on special reasons and exceptional hardship for more detail.

Any type of defence against motoring offences requires a specialist solicitor with experience of this type of case who can help to make your defence as likely to succeed as is possible.

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