According to reports, motor insurer Swinton Specialist is to bring to an end the automatic penalization of drivers with speeding points due to the increased number of motorists who have been convicted of speeding offences. As a result, drivers with six points or more may find themselves being treated as a 'standard' driver when purchasing car insurance from the company.

Prior to this change, these drivers would have faced much higher premiums compared to drivers who hold clean licenses.

Many other insurance companies are expected to follow suit, the Association of British Insurers said, cited in This Is Money.

Due to all of the measures implemented to maintain road safety, such as speed cameras, and with the recent addition to the law which will inflict three points on a license if the driver is caught using a mobile phone while driving, it will soon be rare to find an unblemished license.

Cited in This Is Money, a Swinton spokesman said: Penalty points used to be the yardstick for dangerous drivers, but with up to 10 million drivers collecting them, they are so commonplace that they have almost become pointless.

We will be looking at each driver as an individual and not automatically upping the cost of their premium if they have six penalty points on their license.

The insurer has now established a specialist unit to handle calls specifically from drivers holding penalty points on their license, and, according to Post Online, is already experiencing a high volume of calls.