The six-point rule, which almost nobody is told
For the first two years after passing the test, a driver is on probation under the New Drivers Act. An established driver faces a ban at twelve penalty points. A new driver loses their licence at six.
And losing it here does not mean a suspension that expires. The licence is revoked, the driver reverts to a provisional, and both the theory and the practical test have to be passed again from scratch before they can drive unaccompanied.
Six points is not a career of offending. One hand-held mobile phone offence carries six points on its own — a single use, once, is the whole allowance. Two speeding tickets at three points each will also do it. The practical effect is that the margin for error in the first two years is a single mistake, and almost no seventeen-year-old picking up their first licence knows this.
It is worth saying out loud in a car on the way home from the test centre, because it reframes the phone question from a telling-off into arithmetic.
What the law requires while learning
- A provisional licence from seventeen for a car, and it must be held before any driving on a road.
- The supervising driver must be at least twenty-one and have held a full licence in that category for at least three years. An older sibling who passed last year does not qualify, which catches families out.
- L plates front and rear, clearly visible, and removed when the car is driven by a full licence holder.
- Insurance that actually covers a learner driving that car. Learner policies exist for exactly this and are usually cheaper than adding a provisional driver to a family policy for a few months.
- Motorways only with an approved driving instructor in a dual-control car. A parent cannot supervise motorway practice, however experienced. Motorway lessons became available to learners some years ago and are worth taking, because the alternative is a first motorway journey alone.
Passengers
This is the clearest finding in the whole subject and the one most at odds with how a newly qualified driver wants to use the car.
Compared with driving alone, a young driver's risk of a fatal collision is substantially higher with passengers aboard, and it rises steeply with each one — figures used in UK road safety work put it at around a third higher with one passenger, roughly double with two, and nearly three times with three or more. Close to one in four seriously injured passengers were travelling with a young driver.
The mechanism is not mysterious. Conversation and noise consume attention that an inexperienced driver has none to spare of, and a car full of friends of the same age produces pressure to drive in a way that nobody in it would choose alone.
Several countries restrict young drivers from carrying similar-aged passengers for the first months after qualifying, and graduated licensing of that kind is periodically debated here without being adopted. In its absence it is a family arrangement rather than a legal one — and "not three mates in the car for the first six months" is a reasonable thing to agree in advance, when it is a principle rather than a specific Friday night.
Why inexperience is the actual hazard
Not recklessness, in most cases. Hazard perception is a trained skill, and a new driver can take up to two seconds longer than an experienced one to recognise and respond to a developing hazard. At sixty miles an hour, two seconds is most of a cricket pitch.
It shows up in a specific collision pattern rather than across the board: around seventy per cent of collisions involving drivers aged seventeen to twenty involve loss of control on a bend, or during an overtake. Rural single-carriageway roads at speed, in other words, rather than the busy junctions that worry people most.
Which argues for the unglamorous version of practice: deliberately driving the roads that produce those collisions, with a supervising driver, before driving them alone. Country lanes in the dark and in the wet are worth more practice hours than another trip round a retail park.
Phones
Six points, as above, and a licence gone in one offence. Beyond the law:
- The offence covers holding the phone at all — not just calls. Checking a message at traffic lights counts, because the engine running in a queue is still driving.
- Hands-free is legal and is not safe. The impairment is in the attention, not the hands.
- The arrangement that works is the phone in the glovebox or on do-not-disturb-while-driving before the engine starts, because a phone within reach gets answered.
Drink, drugs and the morning after
- The drink-drive limit is lower in Scotland than in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which matters to anyone driving across the border and is widely not known.
- For a new driver the only workable rule is none at all, partly because a conviction ends the licence outright and partly because there is no reliable way to judge where the limit sits in one's own body.
- The morning after is the one that catches young drivers. Alcohol clears at roughly a unit an hour with no way to speed it up, so a late night of serious drinking can leave someone over the limit at nine the next morning, feeling fine.
- Roadside drug testing is routine, and prescription medicines are included where they impair driving. Cannabis in particular stays detectable well beyond the point at which the driver feels normal.
Speed, and a correction to older advice
The gap to the vehicle in front is the two-second rule in the UK — a fixed point passed by the car ahead, then two full seconds before passing it. Older material, much of it written for American readers, gives four seconds; that is the figure for wet weather, when the two-second gap is doubled, and considerably more on ice.
On speed itself, the limit is a maximum rather than a target, and the figure that matters to a new driver is not the fine but the three points. Two of those is the licence.
Tiredness
Young drivers are over-represented in collisions caused by falling asleep at the wheel, and the combination that produces them is specific: late at night, driving home, after a long day, often with passengers. Teenagers genuinely need more sleep than adults and routinely get less.
Sleepiness is not solved by a window open or music loud. The only answers are stopping, and caffeine as a short-term stopgap after stopping. A journey home at two in the morning after a shift or a night out is the one to arrange a different way.
Seatbelts
Everyone, every time, and the driver is legally responsible for passengers under fourteen. Rear passengers unbelted are a danger to the people in front as well as to themselves, which is the argument that tends to land with a car full of friends.
What a parent can usefully do
- Private practice hours on top of lessons, and plenty of them. The volume of varied supervised driving before the test is one of the few things that reliably predicts a safer first year — night, rain, motorway with an instructor, rural roads, towns.
- Pass Plus or a further training course after the test, which covers the situations the test does not.
- A telematics policy. Insurers that monitor braking, cornering, speed and time of day make the first year cheaper, and the monitoring itself appears to change driving behaviour, which is the more valuable part.
- A sensible first car. Small engine, good safety rating, nothing quick. Insurance pricing tends to enforce this anyway.
- A standing offer of a lift, at any hour, with no questions asked that night. This is the single most protective thing on the list, because the alternative to ringing home is getting into a car with someone who has been drinking.
- Driving the way the advice says, since a teenager has already watched their parents drive for about seventeen years and has learned rather more from that than from any conversation.