Ian came to us as a returning client. He had two previous cases with us, both for Drink Driving, where he was disqualified first for 18 months, and then 36 months for his second offence.
Ian had quite a troubling few years in his life. He had a bad break up with his ex-partner, Lisa, which meant that his contact with his son, Oscar, was drastically reduced to what he was used to when the three of them were living together.
Ian felt lost at this point and started meeting up with old friends and doing drugs and just generally being a nuisance to the public.
Ian received convictions for drug offences, and actually spent 12 months in custody for one of these offences.
When Ian was released from prison he then had to start serving his 36 months’ disqualification. Due to the line of work that Ian was in, he struggled to find a position that would actually employ him without a valid driving licence. Ian decided that he would get away from the whole situation for a while, so went travelling around Europe for 12 months.
Whilst Ian was travelling he met his current partner, Maggie. During this trip Ian completely reformed himself, with the help of Maggie.
The two of them returned to the UK and Ian completely cut all of his old friends out of his life so he could not be tempted to fall back into the same rut as before, and started looking for jobs again.
Ian found a very high profile job that was actually very local to where he lived so he applied and met with the manager of the site where he successfully secured this position.
Ian went to work each day and completed the job to such a high standard that the manager of the site offered him a position on their next job, however this one was based much further away and so Ian would need to have a valid driving licence to secure this job.
Ian came to us and enquired about whether he would be eligible to apply for an early return of driving licence.
At the time Ian had not served two years of the three-year disqualification and so could not make the application for early return of driving licence straight away. However, we started working on the preparation for his case so that when he had served the two years the court could list the application as soon as they were able to, meaning that if the application was successful then he would be back on the road a lot sooner.
Ian’s case was not simple. He needed the early return of driving licence so that he could move on to the new job once his current one had finished, but there was a lot of personal aspects to his case that needed exploring.
Ian’s 5-year old son, Oscar, who lived with his mother, in reality only lived 20 minutes away. However, because Ian couldn’t drive he had to take public transport so the journey took him 45 minutes each way, which made contact with such a young child difficult during the week due to Ian’s working hours and Oscar’s bed time routine.
Before Ian was disqualified, Oscar would be at his house 3-4 times a week and would have frequent sleepovers with Ian taking him to school in the morning as time allowed it. However, this was not possible using public transport. So Oscar was only getting to see his Dad once a week if he was lucky.
In addition to this, Ian’s elderly parents were suffering with health issues. His parents had separated long ago due to his father’s dependency on alcohol, and so his Dad was living alone, and still trying to fight his demons with alcohol on a daily basis. Ian used to spend time with his Dad daily to try and distract him and persuade him against turning to alcohol again. But again because the journey was having to be done by public transport, he would get over to his Dad’s house only at the weekend so was not able to fully support him in his recovery.
Ian’s Mum had recently suffered from a stroke so was now unable to do any of the physical work around the house that needed to be done. It was upsetting to Ian that he could not be there for his Mum and give her the help she needed when she had always been there to help him.
We worked on obtaining evidence for all of these points and prepared the case in a way that would show the court that Ian was a different person to the one he had been when he had committed these offences, and that if the court would grant him his licence back early then they would be helping him to further rebuild his life, and provide the support for his family that they so greatly needed.
The court date came shortly after he had served two years out of the three-year disqualification, and Ian was represented by Emma Shafton, one of our specialist barristers from our premier London chambers. Emma was armed with all the preparation that we had completed in the months’ prior to this court hearing.
Emma went in and guided Ian on how to approach the court and how the case would proceed. After a short deliberation the bench returned and commented that they were impressed with how Ian had turned his life around, and because of this they were willing to lift his disqualification.
An application for an early return of driving licence is not an easy process, but because Ian had got started sooner rather than leaving it to the last minute, we were able to prepare the strongest case possible for him which resulted in a successful application.
If you need help for an early return of driving licence case, call our expert team now on 01623 600645.
