The results take into account various offences including drink driving and speeding
Have you ever sat and wondered whether drivers in London are better than those ‘up North’, or if the roads in the East Midlands are more unruly than they are in Yorkshire?
New research has been carried out by the UK price comparison website Confused.com, to find out which of our nine regions across the country has the worst record when it comes to the amount of motoring offences handed out to drivers.
The survey was based on a total of 2.4 million offences obtained by drivers in the UK from 2015 to 2016. The crimes themselves have been broken down into eight different categories, from fuel theft to hogging the middle lane, and the most offences acquired in total.
The comparison website obtained the data from the 45 police forces in the UK.
According to Confused.com’s findings, the South East is the region that has the worst driving record – 500,000 offences were recorded within the same time period.
New research reveals the worst drivers across the UK by region based on motoring offences © Copyright Basher Eyre and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence
The offence catching the most drivers out in the South East was exceeding the speed limit, with 476,467 motorists pulled over for speeding – a whopping 400,000 more than the whole of Scotland.
This figure accounted for 94% of all motoring offences recorded for the South East region and was notably greater than the North West, with 288,000 recorded speeding offences, followed by East Anglia with 275,000.
Drivers in the South East were not only the worst region for speeding offences, they also came out on top in two other law breaking categories: driving with deficient tyres and for seat belt offences.
Motorists in London and the North East fared pretty similarly, with driving under the influence being an offence they both shared – nearly 26,000 drink or drug-driving offences collected between the two regions.
The two regions also shared comparable figures for motorists/passengers caught not wearing their seatbelt, with London at 7,400 and 7,700 for the North East. However, when added together, the figure is still lower than then number of drivers caught for the same offence in the South East – 14,200.
The West Midlands fared the worst when it came to fuel theft, with a total of 6,700 incidents recorded by the police of drivers leaving the forecourt without paying for their fuel.
“The Confused.com Motoring Crime Map reveals some shockingly high figures for motoring crimes in certain parts of the UK. Given the sheer scale of offences, it’s safe to say that the South East has earned its title as the UK’s motoring offence capital,” said Amanda Stretton, Motoring Editor for the price comparison website.
The company thinks driver perception by many motorists in the UK plays a huge part in their findings.
In Northern Ireland, the level of motoring offences is relatively low, plus research carried out recently found that motorists in Northern Ireland are the happiest drivers out on the roads, with around one in seven saying their driver experience on the whole is a positive one.
In comparison, just one in six drivers in the South East described their overall driving experience as positive.
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