Clandestine entrant fine reduction success
27 June 2024
If you are an operator or driver who carries out international work, you need to be aware that fines in relation to the carrying of clandestine entrants are a real and present risk to you and your business. There are ways to mitigate your risk and improve your systems, such as by joining the Clandestine Entrant Civil Penalty Accreditation Scheme (Scheme) and you can find out more about this here. If this is something you would prefer not to do yourself, we have a team which specialises on advising on Scheme applications and also, what to do if you receive a fine. This is something we have previously written about here.
This week, our dispute resolution team have just secured another reduction in fines imposed for clandestine entrants. A haulage company was found to have 13 clandestine entrants on their vehicle. A penalty was imposed of £78,000.00 for the Driver and a fine of £39,000.00 for the Company. As the Company are registered members of the Civil Penalty Accreditation Scheme their initial fine of £78,00.00 was automatically reduced to £39,000.00. Even with this reduction the fine totalled a cumulative penalty of £117,000.00 for which the company are jointly and severally liable. Our team filed a notice of objection along with financial means documents for border force to consider.
After consideration of this information Border Force have reduced the fine from £39,000.00 for the company to £2,250.00 per entrant. This resulted in a total fine of £29,250.00 for all 13 entrants for the Company. The driver’s fine was reduced from £78,000.00 to £55.00 per entrant. This totalled a fine of £715.00 imposed on the Driver. This represents a total reduction of £87,035.00.
Our client’s reaction to the fine reduction referred to above was: We would like to thank you and your team for the work done on our case. The reduction of the 2 fines for the driver and employer is massive.
Navigating the rules relating to the fines in these situations can be difficult and stressful and we are finding many operators are benefitting from using our team to assist them. Contact us here to arrange a no-obligation conversation.
This article was written by Libby Pritchard, an Associate Director in our dispute resolution team. Research was under taken by Laila Khan and Jo Dawson-Gerrard.
