Between 21 February and 2 May 2024, the Council held a public consultation seeking views on a draft guideline for sentencing aggravated vehicle taking offences guidelines, disqualification and other motoring related matters offences.

On 19 February 2025, we published the definitive guideline and the Council’s response to the consultation:

• Response to consultation – HTML
• Response to consultation – PDF
• About the consultation

Changes made as a result of this project 

This project led to the development of four new guidelines covering aggravated vehicle taking offences:

• Aggravated vehicle taking – death caused
• Aggravated vehicle taking – injury caused
• Aggravated vehicle taking – dangerous driving
• Aggravated vehicle taking – vehicle/property damage caused

The new guidelines replace existing guidelines for magistrates’ courts for aggravated vehicle taking offences involving dangerous driving, accident causing injury and causing damage to vehicle/property and, for the first time, include sentence levels for the Crown Court.

The Council has also issued:

• a new, overarching guideline consolidating all existing guidance on driver disqualification
• a new guideline for vehicle registration fraud offences, including forging, altering or fraudulently using vehicle number plates.

Other, miscellaneous changes to guidelines are:

• an increase in the starting-point fine for people using mobile phones while driving from Band A to Band B
• changing low culpability wording in the Fail to provide a specimen guideline to “Failure falls just short of reasonable excuse”
• altering the wording in high culpability in the Fail to stop and report guideline to remove the wording “and/or left injured party at scene”
• increasing the sentence levels for the highest seriousness level for Excess alcohol (in charge) from a medium level community order to a high level community order; with a range of a medium community order to 12 weeks’ custody, up from the existing low level community order to six weeks’ custody
• changing the format of the speeding table to read left to right in terms of severity

The new guidelines and other changes come into effect on 1 April.