I've read in an article that in Finland road traffic offences are fined in proportion to the driver’s income... That makes a lot of sense to me. An F1 driver was fined 30,000 Euros for not having an appropriate trailer licence.

Of course it's better not to make any road offences at all, so that everybody is safe on the road, but lets say that I have been issued a parking fine for £70, and my neighbour, CEO to a 'big company', has also been issued a similar fine... I will need to pay 10% of my monthly income towards this fine and he will need to pay 2%... is that fair...?

I agree with what you are saying. I think it's even more appropriate to congestion charging (which let's face it will be with us all in the future).

£5 a day in London. Soon adds up. If you earn 10K a year and someone else earns 100K where's the fairness in that. All it does it make driving the preserve of the rich man.

Now if your 100K man had to pay £50 that would be fair (taking into account Tax differences and so on).

I'm not sure exactly how you would go about doing such a system but it makes sense to me.

I do see your point but then people with a few bob will say that they are being discriminated against.


I think the best way around a situation like this is to make the people who can afford the fine pay in full immediatley and those on a lower income be allowed to make payment through installments. I actually thought this already happened.

Fines should be in proportion to the offence.

Why should fines be judges through income?

If i want baked beans from Tesco, and I earn 10K should they charge me half price of someone who earns 20k?

Not in the real world...

Originally posted by viking
Why should fines be judges through income?

If i want baked beans from Tesco, and I earn 10K should they charge me half price of someone who earns 20k?

Not in the real world...

your comparing apples and oranges (or beans and spagetti). Purchasing something is compeltely different to being punished for something.

The punishment should inflict equal distress and hardship on the persons being punished. Fine me £30 and I don't care. Fine someone on minimum wage £30 and they probably have to cut back on eating for a week.
It's perfectly fair that a fine be proportional to income, and is exactly the approach a magistrate will take when deciding how much to fine someone.

The problem is that the government doesn't have an integrated system that would allow the police system issuing fines to means test the person being fined. And if it did I would be worried about what other information any old government department could access about me and my life.

How can you advocate fining people who are successful more? Why should a person who started out on the minimum wage, worked hard at school and university and then got a well paid job be fined more when caught speeding than the person who never cared about school and now earns the minimum wage.

Seems totally unfair to me.

I don't think you should discriminate against someone who has done well in life. The fine should be equal for the same offence, but like I mentioned I think that if you can afford it you should pay up immediatly the full amount.

Originally posted by JonJParr
How can you advocate fining people who are successful more? Why should a person who started out on the minimum wage, worked hard at school and university and then got a well paid job be fined more when caught speeding than the person who never cared about school and now earns the minimum wage.

Seems totally unfair to me.

quite easily. It's not the amount that is relevant, the relevant thing is the effect it will have on you.

Lord SnobALot in his Porche won't care how many times he's fined £30 for illegal parking and for speeding. He doesn't see it as a punishment, it's just the price he pays for a bit of fun and parking right outside the opera.
Someone else though has to go hungry for a week.

Has justice been served, or is the rich guy getting off lightly.

In my opinion it's not fair, and whilst life isn't fair, we can strive to make the things we invent (ie fines) as fair as possible.

If fixed penalty fines are fair, then do you think that paying % tax instead of a flat rate is unfair? Do you think that having a higher bracket of tax above 32k is unfair?

Originally posted by Cyclone
Do you think that having a higher bracket of tax above 32k is unfair?

Hardly the same as earning a high income is not an illegal offence.

Originally posted by MeGe
I've read in an article that in Finland road traffic offences are fined in proportion to the driver’s income... That makes a lot of sense to me. An F1 driver was fined 30,000 Euros for not having an appropriate trailer licence.

Of course it's better not to make any road offences at all, so that everybody is safe on the road, but lets say that I have been issued a parking fine for £70, and my neighbour, CEO to a 'big company', has also been issued a similar fine... I will need to pay 10% of my monthly income towards this fine and he will need to pay 2%... is that fair...?

Yes it is fair... you've both committed the same crime so both pay the same fine. If everything becomes means tested like the socialists want, where is the incentive for people to work hard and earn lots of money?

Originally posted by t020
Yes it is fair... you've both committed the same crime so both pay the same fine. If everything becomes means tested like the socialists want, where is the incentive for people to work hard and earn lots of money?

that makes no sense.
Consider two people, A on low income and B on high income.
They both pay a % of income as tax, and lets for a moment assume that fines are mean tested (in fact, for the example, everything except goods and services not run by the government).

They do exactly the same things A & B, each have the same number of fines, bonuses (yeah right) and penalties. At the end of the day they both come out with 40% of their income left.
So what's the incentive to be B, well 40% of his high income is significantly higher than 40% of A's low income.

Now in the current system, maybe we should take it to the extreme and have everything flat rate.
They do the same stuff, blah, blah, blah.
A now has 40% of his income left, B has 95% of his income left because the flat rates are a much smaller proportion of his income.

Scenario A IMO is fair, both people have been punished the same, and the incentive to earn more still exists. In scenario B, person B (the high earner) can laugh when his fine comes through and just ask the butler to pay it out of petty cash.

Any offence which attracts a fine as punishment is always set according to the persons means, this has been practised in magistrates courts for many many years, the principal being that anyone commiting an offence should feel the same degree of "pinch" for that offence, of course, that does not mean that someone on a very large income faces a fine that is out of all proportion to the offence, an upper limate is set for the type of offence, which then comes down according to a persons means.
This at least helps make the punishment apropriate to the vast majority of offenders.

Originally posted by Cyclone
that makes no sense.
Consider two people, A on low income and B on high income.
They both pay a % of income as tax, and lets for a moment assume that fines are mean tested (in fact, for the example, everything except goods and services not run by the government).

They do exactly the same things A & B, each have the same number of fines, bonuses (yeah right) and penalties. At the end of the day they both come out with 40% of their income left.
So what's the incentive to be B, well 40% of his high income is significantly higher than 40% of A's low income.

Now in the current system, maybe we should take it to the extreme and have everything flat rate.
They do the same stuff, blah, blah, blah.
A now has 40% of his income left, B has 95% of his income left because the flat rates are a much smaller proportion of his income.

Scenario A IMO is fair, both people have been punished the same, and the incentive to earn more still exists. In scenario B, person B (the high earner) can laugh when his fine comes through and just ask the butler to pay it out of petty cash.

I still think on the spot fines should be for the crime. What about the added bureaucracy involved in means testing every single parking ticket, speeding fine, litter fine, dog fouling fine, etc etc?

Originally posted by t020
I still think on the spot fines should be for the crime. What about the added bureaucracy involved in means testing every single parking ticket, speeding fine, litter fine, dog fouling fine, etc etc?

I made the point earlier that unfortunately it is impractical and unworkable to means test fixed penalty fines, I just agree with it in theory.

Originally posted by Cyclone
I made the point earlier that unfortunately it is impractical and unworkable to means test fixed penalty fines, I just agree with it in theory.

And then you compared speeding fines to taxation.

Originally posted by JonJParr
And then you compared speeding fines to taxation.

In an attempt to find out how far your dislike of any sliding scale % based system extends.
You picked out a single point from amongst the post and only answered that one though, and you're going back to it now :confused:

Originally posted by Cyclone
In an attempt to find out how far your dislike of any sliding scale % based system extends.
You picked out a single point from amongst the post and only answered that one though, and you're going back to it now :confused:

Then it was your wording of the question that was flawed. In any case, I disagree fundamentally with charging successful individuals more for a traffic offence than their lower earning counterparts. You can't replace one inequality with another Cyclone; two wrongs don't make a right.

Unless of course the motivation just serves to satisfy an inner hatred of those who are wealthy, in which case it's a poor reason to uphold such an asinine idea.

Originally posted by JonJParr
Then it was your wording of the question that was flawed. In any case, I disagree fundamentally with charging successful individuals more for a traffic offence than their lower earning counterparts. You can't replace one inequality with another Cyclone; two wrongs don't make a right.

Unless of course the motivation just serves to satisfy an inner hatred of those who are wealthy, in which case it's a poor reason to uphold such an asinine idea.

Compared to the 'average' person i'd already be worse off, so it's certainly not a hatred of people who earn more.

Possibly my wording, possibly your misenterpretation of it. But who's to know.

It's not replacing one injustice with another, at least I don't think so. Firstly I don't think people earning different amounts is unjust, secondly I think that a fine as a % of income sounds fair in the first place and the injustice is to use a fixed amount.

How do you justify causing one person significant hardship and causing another none at all, and how do you square a fixed penalty with the rest of the court system that allows magistrates to set fines according to income (within limits as poitned out earlier).

Originally posted by MeGe
Of course it's better not to make any road offences at all, so that everybody is safe on the road, but lets say that I have been issued a parking fine for £70, and my neighbour, CEO to a 'big company', has also been issued a similar fine... I will need to pay 10% of my monthly income towards this fine and he will need to pay 2%... is that fair...?

This would make more sense if all income could be taken into account. The problem would be with the most malicious of offenders; those who have nothing to lose. I'm talking, of course, about theft. If someone has no job (i.e. no income) and gets everything from theft and trading in illegal substances, they would get barely a slap on the wrist. After all, the inland revenue doesn't know how much they're making of their illicit dealings.

I'm not saying that it's right that people with more money can 'get away with it' more than those with less, but there is far more to consider in this situation that simple means testing.

I agree with the theory of what you are saying Cyclone. A punishment is hardly that if someone scoffs at it.

That is why I used the example of congestion charging. By having a fixed rate all you do is remove the people who can't afford it and leave Mr. Rich laughing all the way to his private parking spot.

IMO the point of fines is two fold
1) to punish people who have offended
2) to deter people from offending in the first place.

means tested fines - would help in both these areas.

A rich person would not be detered from a standard parking or speeding fine - as someone else on here said.. they would just see it as an extra expense to their day. If this person were to be fined based on their earnings, they may think twice about doing it.

As for stopping people from striving to suceed and earn more money.... this would not impact on law abiding people! only the law breakers. so if you want to earn more and keep hold of it - simple answer.

Originally posted by Hippy
I agree with the theory of what you are saying Cyclone. A punishment is hardly that if someone scoffs at it.

That is why I used the example of congestion charging. By having a fixed rate all you do is remove the people who can't afford it and leave Mr. Rich laughing all the way to his private parking spot.

completely agree, and your example is a good one (i prefer stupid examples, taking the argument to it's extreme).

spiffy - that argument applies to court fines as well. The answer is presumably that we do our best to ensure that people who live through crime are caught and approrpriately punished. Punish them for stealing, rather than punishing everyone on a low income via a fixed fine for speeding.

I'm not sure if I agree with this. Its not fair. I think the money should be affected by the severity of the crime. You don't want to be in a situation where people are committing driving offences cos they know they can get off with a tiny fine because they have no income.

Rich people are dettered from speeding offences already by the points system. I think its unfair to say that currently rich people think they can afford to commit driving offences.

I think a sliding scale for speeding is a good idea though, ie someone who does 70 in a 30 zone gets fined far more than someone doing 35.

Originally posted by kathythebean
I'm not sure if I agree with this. Its not fair. I think the money should be affected by the severity of the crime. You don't want to be in a situation where people are committing driving offences cos they know they can get off with a tiny fine because they have no income.

Rich people are dettered from speeding offences already by the points system. I think its unfair to say that currently rich people think they can afford to commit driving offences.

I think a sliding scale for speeding is a good idea though, ie someone who does 70 in a 30 zone gets fined far more than someone doing 35.

but the point is that the fine would be proportional to income, not that "they know they can get off with a tiny fine because they have no income", but rather that it's a fine for them that requires some stretching to pay, but if they were a millionaire it would be a significantly larger fine as otherwise it's meaningless.

Maybe I need to clarify that i'm not talking about making fines smaller for low income people, but making them larger for higher income people.

I still dont think its fair. If you're worried about fines not affecting higher earners then go for a different strategy like community service for all offenders, not means tested fines which a) would cause uproar and b) would not work, practically speaking.

Originally posted by kathythebean
I still dont think its fair. If you're worried about fines not affecting higher earners then go for a different strategy like community service for all offenders, not means tested fines which a) would cause uproar and b) would not work, practically speaking.

A good idea, but different people have different amounts of free time. Thus one might struggle to do 10hrs a week community service (say a hard working family person) whilst another would have no problems (say a single dilletante).
Unless the amount of community service depended on the person (in which case it's just means testing for free time), then it's just as unfair as taking a fixed amount of money.

already agreed that means testing at the moment is not workable, I just agree with it in principle