UK Offence Report

Offences, penalty and forfeiture

regulation 4 of The Customs and Excise (Community Transit) Regulations 1987

The provision has been revoked and no saving provision preserving liability for earlier conduct was found.

What the provision says

4 In the event of any contravention or failure to comply with—

a any relevant Community provision, or

b any requirement or condition imposed by or under any such provision, or

c any requirement imposed under regulation

3 hereof, or

d any undertaking given pursuant to any such provision or requirement, the person responsible for the contravention or failure and the person then in charge of the goods shall each be liable on summary conviction to

a penalty of £2000 and any goods in respect of which the offence was committed shall be liable to forfeiture.

Text as made, from legislation.gov.uk. © Crown copyright, reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This is the text as originally made; later amendments are not shown here.

Who it binds, and what has to be proved

Binds
a person
Conduct
breaching a condition of a licence, permit or consent
Fault element
Strict liability
Burden of proof
No statutory defence — prosecution proves everything

The prosecution must prove that the conduct happened. This is a strict liability offence as drafted: the provision uses no word of intention, knowledge, recklessness or negligence, so there is no need to show that a person meant to do it, knew about it, or was careless.

Intention, knowledge and carelessness are irrelevant to guilt. They may still matter a great deal to sentence.

The provision states no defence, so the prosecution bears the burden on every element of the offence.

Classifier’s reasoning: no word of intention, knowledge, recklessness or negligence in the offence or its provision.

What would breach regulation 4?

These are illustrations, not law. They are generated from the provision’s own words to show the shape of the offence. Whether any particular conduct is caught depends on the full text, on any amendment since, and on the facts.

  1. Holding a valid licence but doing the thing it allows outside the hours, place or limits its conditions set under the Customs and Excise (Community Transit) Regulations 1987.
  2. Failing to do something a condition positively requires - a record, a notification, a monitoring step - even though the licensed activity itself is carried on properly.

Penalty

Mode of trial
Summary only — tried in a magistrates’ court
Maximum fine
£2,000
Maximum prison (summary)
Not determined

Sentencing

Offences of this kind are usually sentenced under the guidelines below. This is a mapping by subject, not a finding about this provision, and the links go to a search of the Sentencing Council’s own site.

Prosecution figures

No published per-offence figure was found for this provision, and it could not be matched to a Ministry of Justice offence code. Offences created by statutory instrument very largely do not have one. Absence of a figure is not evidence that the offence is unused.

Status and lifecycle

Current status
Revoked
Revoked by
The Customs and Excise (Community Transit) (No. 2) Regulations 1987
Revoked on
1 January 1988
Made
27 April 1987
In force from
1 June 1987
Extent
Not stated

How this was established: the instrument was revoked by a later instrument found in this corpus.

What the instrument is for

(This note is not part of the Regulations) — the explanatory note published with the instrument, © Crown copyright.

These Regulations replace The Customs and Excise (Community Transit) Regulations 1980. They provide for a penalty and forfeiture in the case of breaches of certain provisions of Community legislation relating to the transit of goods. The penalty and the forfeiture procedure are governed by the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979. The principal changes effected by these Regulations are an increase in the penalty to £2,000 and the inclusion of additional provisions of Community legislation. These Regulations also give the Commissioners of Customs and Excise the power to require goods under the internal or external Community transit procedure within the United Kingdom to be moved by routes specified by them. The Community legislation is contained in Council Regulation (EEC) No. 222/77 and Commission Regulation (EEC) No. 223/77 respectively as amended.

Read the full note and every offence in this instrument

How this was identified as an offence

Everything above rests on the judgement that this provision creates a criminal offence, rather than mentioning one. That judgement is made by rule, from the words of the provision, and this is the rule that made it — with a confidence of 0.72.

Basis
the provision states liability on summary conviction; the provision states a penalty in older drafting
Confidence
0.72 of 1.00

A provision that states a penalty for an offence created elsewhere can read very like one that creates an offence, and the rules can mistake the one for the other. If the text quoted above sets a penalty for something made an offence by another provision, treat the classification on this page with that in mind, and read the instrument.

Check the source