Between 21 February and 2 May 2024, the Council held a public consultation seeking views on a draft guideline for sentencing the blackmail, kidnap and false imprisonment offences.

On 19 February 2025, we published the definitive guideline and the Council’s response to the consultation:

• Response to consultation – HTML
• Response to consultation – PDF
• About the consultation

Changes made as a result of this project 

This project led to the development of four new guidelines covering aggravated vehicle taking offences:

• Aggravated vehicle taking – death caused
• Aggravated vehicle taking – injury caused
• Aggravated vehicle taking – dangerous driving
• Aggravated vehicle taking – vehicle/property damage caused

The new guidelines replace existing guidelines for magistrates’ courts for aggravated vehicle taking offences involving dangerous driving, accident causing injury and causing damage to vehicle/property and, for the first time, include sentence levels for the Crown Court.

The Council has also issued:

• a new, overarching guideline consolidating all existing guidance on driver disqualification
• a new guideline for vehicle registration fraud offences, including forging, altering or fraudulently using vehicle number plates.

Other, miscellaneous changes to guidelines are:

• an increase in the starting-point fine for people using mobile phones while driving from Band A to Band B
• changing low culpability wording in the Fail to provide a specimen guideline to “Failure falls just short of reasonable excuse”
• altering the wording in high culpability in the Fail to stop and report guideline to remove the wording “and/or left injured party at scene”
• increasing the sentence levels for the highest seriousness level for Excess alcohol (in charge) from a medium level community order to a high level community order; with a range of a medium community order to 12 weeks’ custody, up from the existing low level community order to six weeks’ custody
• changing the format of the speeding table to read left to right in terms of severity

The new guidelines and other changes come into effect on 1 April.