Motoring fixed penalty notices

For a stated group of offences — speeding among them — a driver cannot be convicted unless one of three things happened: they were warned at the time that the question of prosecution would be considered, or a summons was served on them, or a notice of intended prosecution was served, within 14 days of the offence being committed. The clock runs from the offence itself, not from the notice, not from the reading and not from the day the paperwork was printed.

The Act then sets out exceptions to that requirement, and they are worth knowing because they are the reason “they missed the deadline” is so often not the answer people hope. The requirement does not apply where there was an accident at the time of the offence or immediately afterwards involving the vehicle. It does not apply where neither the driver’s nor the registered keeper’s name and address could, with reasonable diligence, have been found in time. And it does not apply where the accused’s own conduct contributed to the failure to serve it.

One more distinction matters here. This period governs whether the matter can be pursued at all. It is not the period you have to pay anything, and it is not the period in which a fixed penalty must be issued — those are separate clocks, further down this page.

A fixed penalty notice proper is given to you at the time, or fixed to the vehicle. Where neither happened — which is the ordinary situation for a camera offence — the route is a conditional offer: an offer to discharge liability by paying the fixed penalty and surrendering the licence for endorsement, made after the event. The period is 28 days from the offer, which is longer than the 21 days printed on a fixed penalty notice, and the two are constantly and wrongly treated as one number.

Here the two jurisdictions genuinely diverge, and it is a divergence in who rather than in how long. In England and Wales a conditional offer comes from a constable or a vehicle examiner. In Scotland the procurator fiscal has that role, with the Act also providing routes through a constable or vehicle examiner. If you are looking at a Scottish offer and expecting a police letterhead, that is why it does not look like the English descriptions you have read.

Paying within the period on the notice ends the matter. Proceedings may not be brought for that offence, the liability is discharged, and no conviction occurs. For an endorsable offence the points are endorsed on the driving record as part of that — the notice and the endorsement travel together, and paying is not a way of avoiding them.

If the penalty is not paid, the statute provides that a sum equal to the fixed penalty plus one half of it — £150, where the penalty is £100 — may be registered for enforcement against the recipient as a fine. Once it is registered, it has effect as if it were a fine imposed by that court on conviction, and ordinary fine-enforcement machinery follows.

The permissive word is the Act’s own and is kept here rather than tightened into a threat: the statute says “may”, not “must”. And the same Act supplies the counterweight. Someone who was wrongly served — who never received the notice, or was not the person liable — may make a statutory declaration within 21 days of receiving notice of the registration, which voids the notice, the registration and the endorsement. That safeguard is short, and it is the reason a registration notice is not something to leave in a pile.