Richard Yarrow's opinion for startrescue.co.uk, providing low cost Vehicle Breakdown Insurance.

I think this week’s news that the police are to get powers to issue on-the-spot fines to careless drivers will be broadly welcomed by the majority of motorists. But – and let’s face it, there’s always a ‘but’ – there has got to be some measure of common sense with this.

I was reading the story on the BBC news website earlier this week, and it had a video, taken from the passenger seat of a car, purporting to show some of the incidents which might attract a fine. To me, a pretty experienced driver, there was nothing that you don’t see every five minutes on a trip on any of the UK’s busy roads. If the police are going to issue on-the-spot fines for these sort of misdemeanors they will be doing nothing else.

And that to me is the worry. If they get these powers they will inevitably come with targets. Why? Because everything comes with targets these days. So it could go one of two ways; patrols will be trying to hit the targets to show what a good job they’re doing, and pulling people over left, right and centre. But I think the second option is more likely. Because, as we all know, the police are under-resourced, things like tail-gating, undertaking and cutting people up will be widely ignored as it is now because in reality the police have actually got better things to do with their time.