Specialist Motoring Lawyer Steve Williams reviews the argument for Exceptional Hardship.
Tony Pulis kept his licence yesterday despite speeding at 96 in a 60 and already having 9 points on his licence. The court gave him 6 points for speeding which meant he had a total of 15 points. Once a driving has 12 points or more the court have to disqualify them for 6 months unless they can show exceptional hardship.
Exceptional hardship is more than just inconvenience or hardship, it has to be over and above what you would normally expect from being banned for 6 months and can relate to either the driver or anyone else.
Steve Williams specialises in exceptional hardship applications and is proud of the fact that he has rarely lost a case, this case would have been a challenge though.
“The problem here is that Tony Pulis is very well paid and although he has to do a lot of driving for his job he could not argue that he would lose his job if he was disqualified. The court would expect a football club who pay players £50,000 a week to be able to afford to pay a driver for their manager, or indeed Tony Pulis could have paid for a driver himself. The normal type of application in these circumstances is that someone would lose their job and then suffer exceptional financial hardship. This wasn’t going to work here.
The application was made on the basis that a lot of his work is very confidential and has to be kept secret and although he could afford a driver this would mean that he could not discuss confidential issues in front of the driver and therefore his ability to work would be severely curtailed to the detriment of the football club and this would have a knock on effect on the people of Stoke who benefit from their football club doing so well.
It’s an interesting argument that the town folk of Stoke would suffer if their team were unable to sign star names in secret. Presumably not an argument that the manager of Hereford Town could use given their precarious position at the bottom of the table they couldn’t suffer much more than they already are!”
