Rights and LimitsStopped in the street or in a vehicleStopped while driving in Scotland
Stopped while driving in Scotland
What you must do, and what you can refuse
Every claim below links to the law it comes from, with the wording quoted so you can check it yourself.
You must
Refusing is a criminal offence.
Stop your vehicle when a constable in uniform requires you to.
Road Traffic Act 1988, s.163(1)
“A person driving a mechanically propelled vehicle on a road must stop the vehicle on being required to do so by a constable in uniform”
Read it at legislation.gov.ukquote checked 2026-08-25
Failing to stop when required is a criminal offence.
Road Traffic Act 1988, s.163(3)
“If a person fails to comply with this section he is guilty of an offence.”
Read it at legislation.gov.ukquote checked 2026-08-25
As the person keeping the vehicle, give the information as to the identity of the driver when a chief officer of police requires it.
Road Traffic Act 1988, s.172(2)(a)
“the person keeping the vehicle shall give such information as to the identity of the driver as he may be required to give by or on behalf of a chief officer of police”
Read it at legislation.gov.ukquote checked 2026-08-25
You can refuse
No penalty for saying no.
The section 172 duty is limited to identifying the driver — it does not require you to answer questions about your speed or your journey.
Road Traffic Act 1988, s.172(2)(a)
“the person keeping the vehicle shall give such information as to the identity of the driver as he may be required to give by or on behalf of a chief officer of police”
Read it at legislation.gov.ukquote checked 2026-08-25
Lawful to refuse — but it costs you
Not an offence, but it carries a penalty or an inference.
Refusing to name the driver carries a fine and an obligatory licence endorsement.
Obligatory rather than discretionary, which is why refusing is routinely the worse outcome.
Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988, Schedule 2, Part I — RTA s.172
“Failure of person keeping vehicle and others to give police information as to identity of driver, etc. , in the case of certain offences. Summarily. Level 3 on the standard scale. Discretionary, if committed otherwise than by virtue of subsection (5) or (11). Obligatory, if committed otherwise than by virtue of subsection”
Read it at legislation.gov.ukquote checked 2026-08-25
This is one of the few places the law is identical
Driving law is where Scotland and England & Wales genuinely converge. The Road Traffic Act 1988 is a UK-wide statute, and the duties it creates apply in Scotland in exactly the same terms — this is not a case of similar-but-different rules either side of the border.
You must stop your vehicle when a constable in uniform requires you to. Failing to do so is a criminal offence in itself.
The section 172 duty
If a driving offence is alleged, the person keeping the vehicle must give the information as to the identity of the driver that a chief officer of police requires. This usually arrives as a written request rather than a roadside question, and — as in England and Wales — refusing it is not a way of avoiding the underlying offence.
The penalty for refusing carries a fine and an obligatory licence endorsement, which is frequently a worse outcome than the offence being investigated in the first place.
What the duty does not cover
The section 172 duty is narrow: it requires you to identify the driver, not to answer wider questions about your speed, your route, or what happened. If questioning moves beyond identifying the driver into an interview under caution, the ordinary rules apply — including the position on silence covered on this site’s Scotland police-questioning page, which is genuinely different from the English position.
Last reviewed 2026-08-25. Next review due 2027-02-25. No solicitor has reviewed this page — see [email protected] if you think something here is wrong.