The correlation between motoring and other types of offence

This paper examines the link between traffic offences and criminal offences in Great Britain statistically by linking offence data from two national sources: the Driving and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) and the Home Office. A stratified sample of over 52,000 drivers was selected from DVLA records and matched with the Home Office Offenders Index. The numbers of motoring and non-motoring offences committed by these drivers between 1999 and 2003 were compared at various levels of detail. The results demonstrate the strength of the relationship between the number of motoring and non-motoring offences committed. For example, men who committed between 4 and 8 non-motoring offences committed on average 21 times as many serious motoring offences as men who committed no non-motoring offences, and 3.9 times as many other motoring offences. The strongest relationship was found for the offence of driving while disqualified: on average, men who committed at least 9 non-motoring offences between 1999 and 2003 committed more than 100 times as many of these offences as men who committed no non-motoring offences. At the other extreme, the number of speeding offences was found to decrease with the number of non-motoring offences committed.