Earlier TRL statistical research has confirmed the hypothesis that a driver's willingness to commit motoring offences tends to be associated with their willingness to commit non-motoring offences - what may broadly be called criminal offences. This was done by linking data from an archive maintained at TRL of driving licence licensing details supplied by DVLA with data from the Home Office Offenders Index, which holds the criminal histories of all people convicted of 'standard list' offences in courts in England and Wales. The two sources were re-linked in 2004, about three years after the original study. A sample of over 52,000 drivers was selected from the TRL archive, stratified according to the motoring offences that they committed in or after 1996. Details of these drivers were matched with the Offenders Index using a standard computer program. When a driver could be matched with an offender, details of their offence history were returned to TRL and linked to motoring offences details from the archive. The earlier results concerning the relationship between the number of motoring and non- motoring offences were confirmed and extended. The new study focuses on the period 1999-2003, and the increased proportion of successful matches compared with the earlier study means that its numerical results should be more reliable. (Author/publisher)
Abstract