Banned Jade Mathews caught speeding on York Outer Ring Road

A police camera clocked Jade Mathews driving a Mercedes A-class five-door car on the A64 near Grimston Bar on September 28, said Antony Farrell, prosecuting.

At the time, she was partway through a six-month driving ban imposed under the totting-up procedure for other speeding offences.

When police sent her an official form asking who had been driving her car, they got a reply with another woman’s name and details.

Mathews told a probation officer she had filled in the form, believing she hadn’t been speeding and that she had been driving carefully. She had just completed a drive from York to Leeds and back again.

Mathews, 33, who ran a mobile beautician’s business, of Poppleton Gatehouse, Millgates, Acomb, pleaded guilty to speeding, driving whilst disqualified and driving without insurance. Any car insurance policy is void if the driver is disqualified.

She was made subject to a 12-month community order with 80 hours’ unpaid work and five days’ rehabilitative activities. She was banned for a further six months and ordered to pay £85 prosecution costs and a £114 statutory surcharge.

Mr Farrell said Mathews was first banned from driving by North Yorkshire magistrates on May 9. When police checked her breaking the 70mph speed limit on the York Outer Ring Road on September 28, they checked the car details and found she was its registered keeper and the only person apparently insured to drive it.

After they received the form with the wrong driver’s details they contacted the other woman, who told them she wasn’t the speeding driver and that her name had been used fraudulently “numerous times” in similar situations in different parts of the country, said Mr Farrell.

Mathews’ driving licence photo matched the photo taken by the speed camera of the speeding driver.

For Mathews, Andrew Coleman said she didn’t accept that she had acted fraudulently. There had been three weeks left on the first ban when she was caught speeding.

That ban had ended, but it had cost her 30 to 40 per cent of her business because her clients had not been willing to come to her when she couldn’t go to them.

She now used a room at her parents’ home to do her work.

Mathews told the probation officer she had wanted to sell her car to the woman she later named on the official report, so she had driven the car to Leeds with the aim of coming back without it.

But the second woman had not wanted to buy it, so she had driven it back.