Dangerous driving offences up 20% in Birmingham

Birmingham is a hotspot for dangerous driving according to new government figures, which reveal a 20 per cent rise in offences in just a year.

Analyasis of open crime data from the Home Office reveals that in the 12 months up to June 2015 there were 99 dangerous driving crimes in Birmingham.

Five of those were for death by dangerous driving.

It means there were nine dangerous driving offences for every 100,000 people, which is more than the national average rate of 6.3 per 100,000.

The new figures come in the same week that a devastated father made a heartfelt plea to MPs in Parliament to ban so-called “performance” cars.

Gerard McManus, father of 21-year-old Rebecca McManus, said motor manufacturers were “sticking two fingers up at the law”.

He told MPs that performance cars have ‘no place on our roads’ and should be confined to the race track.

Rebecca was killed on May 31, 2014, as she waited at a bus stop on Hagley Road in Quinton, Smethwick. The promising student had just completed a three-year English degree.

Sales rep Sukvinder Mannan, from Halesowen, was jailed for eight years at Wolverhampton Crown Court after he admitted causing death by dangerous driving.

A second motorist, Inderjit Singh, of Cranbourne Avenue, Wolverhampton, admitted a charge of dangerous driving and accepted he was racing his BMW.

Across the West Midlands as a whole, there were 191 dangerous driving offences in the year to June 2015, including 18 counts of death by dangerous driving.

This is an increase of 15.8 per cent compared to the previous year.

Last month, the new West Midlands Police Chief Constable David Thompson said the region had the country’s biggest problem with illegal street racers and dangerous driving.

He also warned that specialist traffic officers will be taking on street racers and would be using “overt and covert tactics” to disrupt their high-speed gatherings.