Exceptional hardship: what the court is actually looking for

The test is not inconvenience

Every disqualification is inconvenient. Losing your licence makes work harder, family life harder and everything slower. None of that is exceptional, because it is true of every driver who is banned.

What the court is looking for is hardship that goes beyond the ordinary consequences of losing a licence. The clearest way to demonstrate that is to show the effect on people other than yourself.

Hardship to other people carries the most weight

Arguments that succeed tend to involve consequences for third parties: employees who would lose their jobs if the business could not operate, a dependant relative who relies on you for care and transport, or clients in a remote area who could not be reached another way.

An argument built only on the effect on you is much weaker, even where that effect is genuinely serious.

Losing your job is not, by itself, enough

Courts hear that a driver will lose their job in a large proportion of these applications. Standing alone, it rarely persuades.

What can persuade is what follows from it — that the mortgage cannot be paid and the family would lose their home, that a business would close and other people would be put out of work, or that a specific care arrangement would collapse.

Bring evidence, not assertions

This is where most applications come apart. The court is being asked to depart from a mandatory penalty, and it expects to be given a proper basis for doing so.

• Employment contracts, payslips and correspondence from your employer
• Business accounts, and evidence of what the business does and who it employs
• Medical evidence where a dependant’s health or care needs are relied on
• Statements from the people affected — and, where possible, their attendance at court
• Evidence about public transport, taxis or other drivers, and why they would not solve the problem

You will be asked questions

You will usually give evidence yourself, on oath, and you can expect to be challenged on whether the hardship is really exceptional and whether there is another way around it.

Preparation for that is part of the work. So is knowing which questions are coming.

You generally get one go

Where the court accepts an exceptional hardship argument, the same circumstances cannot usually be relied on again within the following three years.

That is worth knowing before the argument is run, because it affects whether this is the right occasion to run it.