R v Hughes
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judge | Lord Toulson,Lord Hughes |
| Judgment Date | 31 July 2013 |
| Neutral Citation | [2013] UKSC 56 |
| Date | 31 July 2013 |
| Court | Supreme Court |
[2013] UKSC 56
Lord Neuberger, President
Lord Mance
Lord Kerr
Lord Hughes
Lord Toulson
Appellant
Robert Smith QC
C J Knox
(Instructed by John Donkin Solicitors)
Respondent
John Price QC
Sarah Whitehouse
(Instructed by CPS Appeals Unit)
Heard on 5 June 2013
Lord Hughes AND Lord Toulson, delivering the judgment of the court
This case concerns the true ambit of the new offence created by section 3ZB of the Road Traffic Act 1988 ("the 1988 Act"). This new section was added by section 21(1) of the Road Safety Act 2006 ("the 2006 Act"). It provides:
"3ZB Causing death by driving: unlicensed, disqualified or uninsured drivers.
A person is guilty of an offence under this section if he causes the death of another person by driving a motor vehicle on a road and, at the time when he is driving, the circumstances are such that he is committing an offence under-
(a) Section 87(1) of this Act (driving otherwise than in accordance with a licence);
(b) Section 103(1)(b) of this Act (driving while disqualified), or
(c) Section 143 of this Act (using a motor vehicle while uninsured or unsecured against third party risks)."
On conviction on indictment, this offence carries imprisonment for up to two years.
On a late Sunday afternoon in October 2009 the defendant Mr Hughes was driving his family in his camper van. They were on their way home from a motor sports event. The road was the A69 single-carriageway trunk road which runs more or less due west from Newcastle-upon-Tyne towards Carlisle. Mr Hughes and his family were travelling east towards Newcastle. The speed limit was the national limit of 60 mph. His driving was faultless, and his speed a steady 45–55 mph. As he rounded a right-hand bend on his correct side of the road he was confronted by a motor car driven by a Mr Dickinson in the opposite direction. Mr Dickinson's car was veering all over the road; it twice crossed to its wrong side and it smashed into Mr Hughes's camper van, tipping it over and trapping some of the occupants inside. The oncoming driver, Mr Dickinson, suffered injuries in the impact which proved fatal.
Without saying any more it would be apparent that the collision was entirely the fault of Mr Dickinson. As it transpired, he was under the influence of heroin, as well as overtired. He worked at a power station at Largs on the west coast of Scotland. He had worked a series of 12 hour night shifts. That Sunday he had driven from Largs to Newcastle and was on his way back, a round trip of something like 400 miles, of which he had completed about 230. He was a drug user. He was maintained on a prescription dose of methadone, no doubt as a substitute for heroin, but on this day blood analysis proved that he had taken a significant quantity of heroin. He additionally had other controlled drugs in his blood, although they would not, given the heroin level, have had a significant bearing on the accident. No doubt because of the combination of heroin and over-tiredness, Mr Dickinson had been driving erratically for some time before the collision. He had wandered both off the road to the nearside and across to the wrong side of the centre white line. There had nearly been an earlier collision when he was partly on the wrong side of the road, and an oncoming car had had to swerve to avoid being hit by him. Mr Dickinson had appeared to following drivers to be unaware of this incident, and rather than taking any avoiding action he had merely drifted back to his correct side of the road in the course of the swerving pattern he was exhibiting. That earlier oncoming driver was fortunate. Mr Hughes was not. He too tried his best to avoid collision by steering to his left, but Mr Dickinson took no avoiding action at all and the impact was the result. It is accepted on all sides that there was nothing Mr Hughes could do to avoid the collision.
Although his manner of driving could not be criticised, Mr Hughes was without insurance. That was not, in this instance, through inadvertence. He had, culpably, chosen to disregard what everyone knows is the duty of a driver to carry insurance against liability to a third party. He had, and advanced, no excuse for being uninsured. He was also without a full driving licence. He was not disqualified from driving, but his licence had, several years earlier, been revoked on medical grounds. Subsequently he had passed a medical test and had received a letter offering congratulations on being able to get his licence back. A licence had been issued to him, which he said he thought was a full licence but which was in fact a provisional one. Whatever the truth about his belief on this score, he was undoubtedly guilty of the two offences of driving uninsured and driving without a full licence, for both of these offences are ones of strict liability which can be committed without any fault on the part of the driver. Those offences, contrary respectively to sections 143 and 87 of the 1988 Act, rendered him liable to prosecution, to fine, to penalty points and to disqualification. Neither of those offences carries a sentence of imprisonment.
Rather, however, than being prosecuted for, and suffering the consequences of, these two offences, Mr Hughes was prosecuted for two offences under the new section 3ZB, namely for causing the death of Mr Dickinson at time when he was uninsured and without full driving licence. On his behalf it was submitted that he had not committed either additional offence because he had not caused the death of Mr Dickinson. The Recorder of Newcastle ruled in his favour on that point, but the Crown appealed that ruling to the Court of Appeal, Criminal Division. By the time of the hearing, the Court of Appeal considered itself bound to allow the Crown's appeal by an intervening decision in another case involving section 3ZB. Consistently with that earlier decision — R v Williams [2010] EWCA Crim 2552; [2011] 1 WLR 588, it ruled that Mr Hughes had — in law —caused the death. Williams had held that it was not an element of the offence that the defendant's driving had to exhibit any fault contributing to the accident. It had held, moreover, that it was enough that the defendant was uninsured, or without full licence, and that his car had been involved in the fatal collision. The Court of Appeal in the present case followed that ruling. Mr Hughes appeals against its decision.
It follows that the question for this court is whether or not these two decisions of the Court of Appeal Criminal Division are correct. If they are, the consequence is, as Hooper LJ observed in the course of his judgment in the present case, that Mr Hughes is held criminally responsible for the death of Mr Dickinson although on a common sense view Mr Dickinson was entirely responsible for the collision which resulted in his immediate death. It also follows that if the injuries which Mr Hughes's wife and son sustained had proved fatal, as easily might have happened, he would have had no defence to the charge of also causing the deaths of his own close family. This would have been notwithstanding the fact that Mr Dickinson, if he had survived to be prosecuted, would on any view have been guilty of causing their deaths by dangerous driving (section 1 of the 1988 Act) or, at the very least, by careless driving coupled with being unfit to drive through drugs (section 3A of the same Act), both of which are very serious offences carrying a maximum sentence of 14 years.
The circumstances of Williams demonstrate that the problem raised by this case is neither unusual nor exceptional. There too the defendant was uninsured, again in that case deliberately so. He was driving in a perfectly proper manner along an urban dual carriageway, within the prevailing 30 mph speed limit, when a pedestrian jumped over the central reservation, stepped out right in front of his car, and was killed in the impact. It was agreed on all sides that there was nothing the defendant could have done to avoid hitting the pedestrian, and that unhappily the pedestrian was entirely responsible for his own death. The jury made it clear by two questions that it was uncomfortable with the prospect of convicting the defendant in these circumstances, but loyally abided by the judge's direction that fault in the manner of driving was not an element in the offence and that it made no difference if the pedestrian was the principal cause of his own death, so long only as the presence of the defendant's car was a cause of the death, and not de minimis. Williams was convicted and the Court of Appeal upheld his conviction.
The duty of every driver to maintain insurance against liability to third parties who might be injured in any road accident is of great public importance. The public expects that a person injured in a road accident through the fault of someone else will have recourse to proper compensation for his injuries and loss. Since the driver at fault may well not have the money to meet the necessary compensation himself, this can only be achieved by insisting on compulsory insurance against the risk. So firm is this public expectation that for over 60 years the motor insurance industry as a whole has accepted the obligation to provide compensation even where the driver at fault had no insurance, so that the innocent injured person shall not be left without compensation. The cost of this safety net inevitably falls on the great majority of law abiding drivers who do have insurance; their premiums have to be increased to an extent to pay for those who flout their obligations. So Mr Hughes, in the present case, was committing a serious offence in seeking to profit by not paying the insurance premium which he ought to have paid and by leaving it, in effect, to the rest of the driving...
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