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DRIVING LICENCES-photo card

Unwitting motorists face £1,000 fines as thousands of photo card driving licenses expire. Thousands of motorists are at risk of being fined up to £1,000 because they are unwittingly driving without a valid license.

They risk prosecution after failing to spot the extremely small print on their photo card license which says it a automatically expires after 10 years and has to be renewed - even though drivers are licensed to drive until the age of 70.

The fiasco has come to light a decade after the first batch of photo licenses was issued in July 1998, just as the they start to expire.

Motoring organisations blamed the Government for the fiasco and said 'most' drivers believed their licenses were for life. 

They said officials had failed to publicise sufficiently the fact that new-style licenses - unlike the old paper ones - expire after a set period and have to be renewed.

To rub salt into wounds, drivers will have to a pay £17.50 to renew their card - a charge which critics have condemned as a 'stealth tax' and which will earn the Treasury an estimated £437million over 25 years.

Official DVLA figures reveal that while 16,136 expired this summer, so far only 11,566 drivers have renewed, leaving 4,570 outstanding.

With another 300,000 photo card licenses due to expire over the coming year, experts fear the number of invalid licenses will soar, putting thousands more drivers in breach of the law and at risk of a fine.

At the heart of the confusion is the small print on the tiny credit-card-size photo license, which is used in conjunction with the paper version.

Just below the driver name on the front of the photo card license is a series of dates and details - each one numbered.

Number 4b features a date in tiny writing, but no explicit explanation as to what it means.

The date's significance is only explained if the driver turns over the card and reads the key on the back which states that '4b' means 'license valid to'.

Even more confusingly, an adjacent table on the rear of the card sets out how long the driver is registered to hold a license - that is until his or her 70th birthday.

A total of 25million new-style licenses have been issued but - motoring experts say - drivers were never sufficiently warned they would expire after 10 years.

Motorists who fail to renew their licenses in time are allowed to continue driving. But the DVLA says they could be charged with 'failing to surrender their license', an offence carrying a £1,000 fine.

AA president, Edmund King said: 'It is not generally known that photo card licenses expire: there appears to be a lack of information that people will have to renew these licenses.

'People think they have already paid them for once over and that is it.

'It will come as a surprise to motorists and a shock that they have to pay an extra £17.50.'

The AA called on the Government to use the annual £450million from traffic enforcement fines to offset the renewal charge.