Bernard Allen (Cork North Central, Fine Gael)
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Question 503: To ask the Minister for Transport if persons who incur penalty points pursuant to section 5 of the Road Traffic Act 2002 and who pay their fines on time receive notifications from the Department of Transport informing them that the endorsement of the penalty points is only made effective on their driving licences five to six months after the date of the alleged offence due to Garda administrative backlogs; that the five to six-month extension means motorists are serving three and a half years instead of the correct timeframe of three years for penalty points; if there is nothing stipulated in the Road Traffic Act 2002 to suggest that additional timeframe would be added to the three year timeframe by the Department of Transport to those who pay their fines on time; and if he proposes to deal with this serious loophole together with a number of the overall inadequacies associated with the penalty point system which are extremely unfair to those who pay their fines on time for the alleged penalty points. [19623/05]

Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)
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The Road Traffic Act 2002, which provides the legislative basis for the introduction and operation of the penalty points system, contains specific provisions governing application of such points on the licence record of an individual. Section 5 of the Act provides that where penalty points are to be endorsed on a record, a notification of that endorsement must be issued to the licence holder involved. The notice sets out in particular the basis for the endorsement of the points.

Section 7 of the Act provides that, save in very limited and quite specific instances, the operative date for penalty points is 28 days from the date of the notice issued under section 5. This date is referred to in the Act as the "appropriate date", the provisions on which recognise that as a result of the endorsement of penalty points a person may face the application of an automatic disqualification from driving. Section 3 of the Act establishes that where a person accumulates at least 12 penalty points, he or she will be disqualified for a period of 6 months.

If penalty points were to be applied from the date of the commission of the offence in the first instance or from the date of the payment of the fixed charge, a person could be faced with the prospect that they would have already been disqualified in advance of any notification being sent to that effect. This would, in turn, create the situation that a person would be open to a charge of driving when disqualified where they had driven in the period between the commission of the original offence or the payment of the charge and the date of the notice.

The penalty points system has been designed and structured to ensure that any person who is accused of the commission of a penalty point offence is afforded a significant time period to chose whether or not to allow the matter to proceed to court. Save in respect of eight of the 70 offences determined to be penalty point offences in the Act, the option of the payment of a fixed charge is afforded to the accused person. A person presented with a fixed charge notice is given a period of 56 days in which to make such a payment before the certainty of a court summons is applied.

There is therefore a potentially significant period made available to a person to make a decision and all of the time lapses established in the Act are set out in the fixed charge notice issued in respect of the alleged commission of the offence.

Both the Courts Service and the Garda Síochána transfer the appropriate data relating to convictions and payment of fixed charges to the Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government to facilitate its entry into the national driver file, which is the responsibility of that Department. The administrative arrangements that apply to the operation of the fixed charge system by the Garda Síochána are a matter for the Garda Commissioner. In that context, as the processing of data on fixed charges by the Garda Síochána is operated on a manual basis, data relating to payments is received in non-electronic format by a company engaged by my Department to convert such data for transmission electronically to the national driver file. This process takes about five working days from date of receipt of the data.

The penalty points system has been operating successfully since its introduction in October 2002. The system was designed on the basis that its ultimate operation would be supported by a series of linked IT projects. The national driver file is fully operational and other IT support being developed by the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform will be available later this year. This will facilitate a major extension of the operation of the system, which will in turn augment the level of deterrent against poor driver behaviour and thus further enhance road safety.