UK driving law for Americans on a visitors visa

I think Phil has a bit of a point buried in there somewhere - do we as immigrants have a good grasp of UK law?

I really don't understand quite a few things:

What is a caution?
Are private parking tickets/train fare fines really official or whatever?

Those are just two off the top of my head. I have been reading about Roy Keane (football guy with cool beard). He apparently had a road rage incident and is being questioned (under caution). It is said he may have made an obscene gesture to a cabbie.

Are rude gestures even illegal?

This thing with the Chelsea supporters throwing the guy off the train in Paris.... the club is becoming involved in "policing" it. It was deplorable....but why is the team/management in any way connected with it?

This thing with the Chelsea supporters throwing the guy off the train in Paris.... the club is becoming involved in "policing" it. It was deplorable....but why is the team/management in any way connected with it?

I think it's similar in nature to people getting banned from stadiums in the US when they get too drunk and abusive at baseball games (or whatever games).  If you extend that out from the stadium, it's a similar line of thought.

OK, this is all a little muddled, but charitably assuming that this is a genuine query my understanding of the law on this is as follows:

(1) It is illegal to use a car on the public road without valid insurance. It is not illegal to own a car without insurance.

(2) There is no nationality requirement to purchase a car in the UK. You pay the money, you own the car.

(3) The requirements for proof of address could be for a multitude of reasons, but the main ones are where you are buying from a dealership or on finance and are used to prove identity rather than nationality or right to reside. Consider for a moment the process of buying a second hand car from a private individual - this can be done in cash and all that is needed is the filling in of the 'log book' or V5C registration certificate with the new owner's details (including address). There is no requirement for the selling party to verify that address in any way, and not so doing does not nullify the purchase of the vehicle.

Therefore the general upshot is that you can buy a car and own it perfectly legitimately regardless of residential status. To the drive that car or leave it on the public road you additionally require valid insurance, valid road tax and a valid driving licence.

I haven't cited the 'law' for this, because, quite simply, there isn't one to cite. Laws tend to legislate for what you can't do rather than for what you can.

Oh, and I'm a Brit too. Though sadly not from the 'shires', so that may disqualify me.

(1) It is illegal to use a car on the public road without valid insurance. It is not illegal to own a car without insurance.

That's not true. It is illegal to own a vehicle without insurance. Keeping the vehicle off road doesn't cancel that law, unless a SORN has been declared for that vehicle.

When you buy a vehicle, the previous owner updates DVLA records with the new owners details. DVLA and the MIB recently started to share information to check which vehicles don't have insurance. The ANPR cameras also record information for various government offices.

From the MIB:-

"As part of Continuous Insurance Enforcement (CIE) it is a legal offence to keep a vehicle without insurance unless you have notified DVLA that your vehicle is being kept off the road by means of a Statutory Off Road Notice (SORN).

You don’t have to be driving to be caught.

Under the CIE system, MIB and the DVLA are working in partnership to identify uninsured vehicles by comparing DVLA vehicle records against those held on the Motor Insurance Database (MID)."

"These insurance enforcement measures are in addition to the powers the police already have to seize an uninsured vehicle and fine the driver."
http://www.mib.org.uk/Motor+Insurance+Database/en/Continuous+Insurance+Enforcement/default.htm


From the UK government.

"You do not need to insure your vehicle if it is kept off the road and declared as off the road (SORN). This rule is called ‘continuous insurance enforcement’.

If not, you could:

    
    get a fixed penalty of £100
    have your vehicle wheel-clamped, impounded or destroyed
    face a court prosecution, with a possible maximum fine of £1,000"

It doesn’t matter who is driving the car - if you’re the registered keeper, you could get penalised.

You will also still have to pay for your insurance on top of any fines received.

https://www.gov.uk/vehicle-insurance/uninsured-vehicles

Sirius, sorry I should have clarified - in order to avoid additional penalties for owning a car without insurance, you do indeed need to complete a SORN. However, the fact remains, and I stand by my intial post, it is still not illegal to own a car without insurance, you just have to complete a notification that it is off the road to avoid committing an offence of not having an insured car. Once you have completed the SORN, as you say yourself, there is then no requirement to have insurance (though it might still be a good idea anyway - particularly if a car is valuable/being stored for some time).

What I was trying to get at is that the insurance part is not a bar to purchasing and legitimately owning a vehicle - a pure title question if you will.

If you buy a car you will still own it regardless of insurance status and it is legal to do so. Whether you will get into trouble for not having insurance as well will depend on whether you have insurance too or have completed a SORN. In the event of owning a car and not having insurance or a SORN you will be liable to the penalties for the offence of not having insurance - it doesn't cancel your title to the vehicle.

Sorry to be pedantic, but I think its important to separate the two concepts.

Aside from USAA (for eligible members and associate members) and GEICO, and for Visiting Forces and diplomats and a few other special cases, owning and insuring a UK car by a nonresident is difficult. Whether it is "legal" as such isn't the point: the question is whether there are practical workarounds. For one thing there are thousands of car owners in Britain without right of abode who keep cars at their vacation homes.

Here's one suggestion from a Daily Telegraph help column: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/caradvice/honestjohn/7922584/How-you-can-insure-visitors-from-overseas-on-you-car.html There are lots of others to be found with a search engine.

And here's my own anecdotal experience: My daughter's ex-boyfriend, an Australian here on a visitor visa (he had the right to claim residence on the basis of his father's or grandfather's UK birth but this is beside the point as (1) he never did, and (2) neither DVLA nor his insurer knew that). At one point he returned to Australia, abandoning his car in the garage of my daughter's apartment building.

I rang DVLA and eventually worked out a viable solution, starting with an immediate SORN. I thought I could just get a car transporter (using "trade plates" - those red plates stuck onto cars driven by professional transport drivers and the subject of a 2013 Radio 4 programme: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b021406q In the USA these are either transporter or dealer plates) but DVLA told me (I think wrongly) that trade plates can be used only by a firm having a financial interest in the car, so I couldn't get a "trade plater" to take the car to auction for me.

In the end this is what we did: There were no papers for the car. Nonetheless DVLA, based on the SORN and after a waiting period gave us some kind of form with which we sold the car to a used-car dealer for £400 and he took the car away with his trade plates. The former owner, in Australia, didn't mind.

On trade plate insurance, see this: https://www.cglloyds.co.uk/commercial-insurance/motor-trade-insurance/trade-plate-insurance (not valid for "Social, Domestic and Pleasure"). Which reminds me of this, another possible (but temporary) workaround: if you bring a car to Dover with no plates at all (perhaps because you took them off while on the ferry to return them to the issuing government), you can buy Q plates from the AA at the port, get a Customs permit for (I think) 6 months, and buy insurance cover (any visitor can (and must) buy insurance cover for an imported car if s/he doesn't have a green-card or proof of UK insurance. (I have actually done this, but it was 30 years ago so procedures may have changed.) Recent TV footage of high-end Arabian-Gulf-registered cars being towed in Knightsbridge for lack of insurance says it all. (Once you have Q plates you can go to the AA's Basingstoke office and get a temporary international logbook. No wonder Britain is one of the world's favourite countries for car theft.)