St Albans family’s campaign to remove unfit drivers’ licences successful

A CAMPAIGN to give the police power to temporarily suspend the driving licences of motorists they feel are unfit to drive has been successful nearly two years after the death of a former St Albans pupil.

Former Sandringham School pupil Cassie McCord, 16, was fatally injured in a collision where she was hit by a car that mounted a footpath and struck her and two other pedestrians as they walked along a pavement in Colchester, Essex, in February 2011.

It later emerged that the driver, 87-year-old Colin Horsfall, of Colchester, who was driving a Vauxhall at the time, had been involved in an accident at a petrol station days earlier.

Essex Police had sent details of the earlier incident to the DVLA, but were not able to remove his licence. The elderly man died in a care home three months after the fatal crash.

The grieving McCord family immediately launched a campaign, named Cassie’s Law, to change a loophole in the law to give police the power to temporarily suspend the driving licence of motorists they believe are unfit to drive.

Sam McCord, a former Beaumont School pupil, spent months collecting signatures for a petition for Cassie’s Law, including in St Albans city centre.

More than 45,000 people have signed that petition over the last 15 months.

Today (Thursday) Sam hailed a decision by the DVLA to give police the extra powers needed to revoke a driver’s licence where they considered them unfit to drive.

More information will be published in next week’s Herts Advertiser.