Notice of Intended Prosecution: What to Do Next

What a Notice of Intended Prosecution actually is

A Notice of Intended Prosecution (NIP) is a formal warning that the police are considering prosecuting you for a driving offence. It is not a conviction, not a fine, and not a court summons. It exists to put you on notice while the incident is still fresh, so you have a fair chance to remember what happened and gather any evidence.

The rule is in section 1 of the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988. It covers a specific list of offences: speeding, careless and dangerous driving, ignoring traffic signs or police direction, leaving a vehicle in a dangerous position, and the equivalent cycling offences. That list is Schedule 1 to the same Act.

For those offences, you cannot be convicted unless one of three things happened. You were warned at the time, a summons was served within fourteen days, or an NIP was served within fourteen days. Plenty of motoring offences are not on the list. No NIP is needed for drink-driving, for example, or for driving without insurance.

For a camera or speed-van offence, the notice goes to whoever is the registered keeper at the time. That is why it lands with the person named on the V5C logbook rather than the person who was actually behind the wheel.

A camera NIP usually arrives stapled to a second document, a section 172 notice, which asks you to name the driver. They look like one letter. Legally they are two different things, with two different deadlines, and the second one is the one that gets people into trouble.

This guide is part of our series on running a used car. It covers England, Wales and Scotland; Northern Ireland has its own separate road traffic legislation.

The 14-day rule, and what it actually requires

The fourteen days run from the day the offence was committed, and the day of the offence itself is not counted. That is the long-standing approach to criminal time limits: the Crown Prosecution Service applies it the same way to the six-month limit for starting a summary prosecution.

Three points are often misreported, so it's worth being precise.

It only applies to Schedule 1 offences. If the offence isn't on that list, there's no 14-day requirement to fail.

Only the first warning has to be within 14 days. Section 1 requires one of the three things above inside the window. After that the prosecution can take considerably longer, because the general limit for starting a summary prosecution is six months from the offence, under section 127 of the Magistrates' Courts Act 1980. A follow-up letter arriving three months later isn't automatically defective; a first NIP arriving three months later is a different question.

The notice has to include certain details. Section 1(1)(c) requires it to specify the nature of the alleged offence and the time and place it's alleged to have been committed. A notice that doesn't isn't doing its statutory job.

One more thing. The burden sits with you, not the police. Section 1(3) says the requirement "shall in every case be deemed to have been complied with unless and until the contrary is proved." In practice that means valid service is assumed, and it's for the defence to show otherwise.

Does it have to arrive within 14 days, or just be sent?

This is where most pages on the subject go wrong, in one of two directions. Some say flatly that the notice must physically reach you within 14 days. Others say, equally flatly, that only the posting date matters and receipt is irrelevant. Neither is right.

Since 2022, the answer in England and Wales has turned on a different set of rules from the one most pages still quote.

So what changed in 2022? The Judicial Review and Courts Act 2022 added new subsections to section 1 of the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988, in force from 28 June 2022. Section 1(1ZA) says that for an offence to be prosecuted in England and Wales, an NIP may be served in accordance with the Criminal Procedure Rules. Section 1(1ZC) then says the Act's own postal provisions, subsections (1A) and (2), apply where the offence is to be prosecuted elsewhere, which in practice means Scotland.

In England and Wales, service now runs through the Criminal Procedure Rules 2025 (SI 2025/909), in force since 6 October 2025. Rule 4.4 lets a document be sent by first class post to an address where the sender reasonably believes you will receive it. Rule 4.11 then fixes the date of service: unless something different is shown, a document sent by first class post is served on the second business day after the day it was posted.

That last phrase, "unless something different is shown", matters. Under rule 4.11, every postal and indirect method of service is a rebuttable presumption: a starting assumption that evidence can displace. So "it turned up late" is not a hopeless argument in England and Wales, whatever class of post was used. You do have to evidence it, though, and section 1(3) puts that burden on you.

In Scotland, the older wording still applies, and it is harsher. Section 1(2) deems a notice served if it was sent by registered post or recorded delivery to your last known address, "notwithstanding that the notice was returned as undelivered or was for any other reason not received by him." That deeming cannot be displaced. Never seeing it is not a defence.

So where does the well-known case law fit? Gidden v Chief Constable of Humberside 2009 EWHC 2924 (Admin) is the case most often cited on this, and it is worth knowing what it did and didn't decide. A notice posted first class in good time was actually delivered on day 16 after a postal strike. The High Court held that because it hadn't gone by recorded or registered delivery, section 1(2)'s deeming didn't apply, and the notice hadn't been properly served.

That was decided under the pre-2022 framework. It is still the clearest illustration of why a rebuttable presumption matters. But it is no longer the governing rule for service in England and Wales, so treat pages that present it as current English service law with caution.

When the 14-day rule doesn't apply

Two exceptions in section 2 of the same Act do a lot of work.

The first is an accident. Section 2(1) removes the section 1 requirement entirely where, at the time of the offence or immediately after it, an accident occurred owing to the presence of the vehicle on a road. The logic is that a driver involved in a collision already knows something has happened, so a warning adds nothing.

Courts have read "accident" broadly. In R v Currie 2007 EWCA Crim 926, the Court of Appeal upheld a dangerous driving conviction where a car lurched forward and a police officer put her hands on the bonnet to avoid being knocked over. That contact was enough for the trial judge to treat it as an accident under section 2(1).

The courts read "accident" as an untoward occurrence with an adverse physical result, sensibly rather than narrowly, and the Court of Appeal accepted that the occurrence need not have been unintended. So if your case involves any contact at all, don't assume the 14-day rule is in play.

The second is details that couldn't be traced in time. Section 2(3) says failure to comply with section 1 isn't a bar to conviction where neither your name and address nor the registered keeper's could with reasonable diligence have been found in time to serve the notice, or where your own conduct contributed to the failure. If your V5C address is out of date because you never told DVLA you'd moved, that subsection is pointing straight at you.

Section 2(2) also disapplies the requirement where a fixed penalty notice has been issued.

Do you have to name the driver? The section 172 notice

Yes, in almost all cases. The NIP and section 172 notice do different jobs.

Section 172 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 is a separate provision from the NIP. It places a legal duty on the person keeping the vehicle to give such information as to the identity of the driver as they're required to give by or on behalf of a chief officer of police. In plainer words: when the police ask who was driving, the keeper has to say. Anyone else who is asked must give any information in their power that may lead to identifying the driver.

The deadline is different too. Where the requirement is made by written notice, section 172(7)(a) gives you 28 days beginning with the day the notice is served to provide the information. The NIP's 14 days is a deadline on the police. The section 172 notice's 28 days is a deadline on you.

Failing to comply with a section 172 requirement is itself an offence, under section 172(3). Schedule 2 to the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988 sets the penalty. Tried summarily, that is a fine at level 3 on the standard scale (currently £1,000, under section 122 of the Sentencing Act 2020), obligatory endorsement of 6 penalty points, and discretionary disqualification.

Compare that with the minimum penalty for the speeding offence itself, which gov.uk gives as a £100 fine and 3 points. In penalty terms, ignoring the section 172 notice is roughly twice as bad as accepting the speeding.

If you genuinely don't know who was driving, section 172(4) provides a defence for the keeper. You are not guilty if you show that you did not know, and could not with reasonable diligence have ascertained, who the driver was. "Reasonable diligence" is the sticking point, because you're expected to have actually tried. Section 172(7)(b) gives a second, separate route: you're not guilty if you show either that you gave the information as soon as reasonably practicable after the 28 days ended, or that it hasn't been reasonably practicable for you to give it.

On being away from home: in R (Purnell) v Snaresbrook Crown Court 2011 EWHC 934 (Admin), the court held that section 172 imposes no duty on a registered keeper to make themselves available at the registered address to receive notices. But not being there makes the statutory defence considerably harder to establish. That's a narrow escape hatch, not a strategy.

What to do when an NIP lands on your doormat

Note the dates. Write down the date of the alleged offence, the date on the notice, the postmark if there is one, and the date it actually arrived. Keep the envelope, fussy as that sounds. If service ever becomes an issue, that envelope is your evidence.

Check which documents you've actually got. Is there a section 172 request in there as well? If so, its 28 days is already running.

Work out who was driving. Check diaries, work records, and anyone else insured on the car. If you genuinely can't establish it, write down what you did to try, because that record is the substance of a section 172(4) defence.

Respond to the section 172 notice on time, in the way it asks. Many forces offer an online response as well as the paper form, and the notice itself will say what it accepts. Whether or not you intend to challenge anything later, this bit gets done.

Don't admit to anything you're unsure about, and don't guess at a name. Naming the wrong person creates a new problem rather than solving the old one.

Get advice if you're near a ban, or the offence is serious. If more points would put you at or over 12 within three years, or you passed your test within the last two years and would reach 6, the stakes are your licence rather than a fine. That is the point where I would talk to a motoring solicitor.

Allow for the knock-on effect. Points and a conviction generally have to be disclosed to your insurer and usually push the premium up at renewal, which makes them a running cost rather than a one-off fine. Our free car check includes a running-costs estimator, so you can see what a car is realistically costing you before the renewal quote lands.

Does an NIP mean you'll definitely be prosecuted?

No. The notice says prosecution is being considered, not that it's been decided. For a straightforward speeding offence there are two common outcomes. One is a conditional offer of a fixed penalty; gov.uk gives the minimum as a £100 fine and 3 points.

The other, where you're eligible and the speed falls in the right band, is the offer of a speed awareness course instead. Courses aren't offered for every offence, and eligibility is set by the police rather than by you.

A case reaches court where the offence is more serious, where you turn down the fixed penalty, or where you plead not guilty. Fines then run higher: gov.uk puts the maximum at £1,000, or £2,500 for a motorway offence. Twelve or more points within three years normally means disqualification, and a driver within two years of passing their test loses their licence at 6 points.

None of that starts until the process runs its course. The envelope is the beginning of it, not the verdict.

Common questions