Sunak agrees to pay fine over not wearing seatbelt

Rishi Sunak is to pay a fine over his failure to wear a seatbelt during a visit to Lancashire on Thursday, with the prime minister apologising for a “brief error of judgment” for not having it on while in the car.

Downing Street announced on Friday evening that Sunak would pay a fixed-penalty notice after Lancashire Constabulary said it had made a “conditional offer of a fixed penalty” to a “42-year-old man from London”. It said the offer followed “circulation of a video on social media showing an individual failing to wear a seatbelt while a passenger in a moving car in Lancashire”.

“The prime minister fully accepts this was a mistake and has apologised,” Downing Street said. “He will, of course, comply with the fixed penalty.”

Neither Downing Street nor Lancashire Constabulary gave an amount for the fine.

The penalty is Sunak’s second in a year. He was fined in April last year, while chancellor, for attending a brief party in Downing Street for then prime minister Boris Johnson’s birthday in Downing Street.

The fine caps a difficult week for the prime minister. He had hoped to regain the political initiative with an announcement of new “levelling-up” funds to boost the economies of deprived areas around the UK.

He removed his seatbelt to film a video on the issue while travelling to Morecambe, in Lancashire, for a press conference about funding for a project in the seaside town. The town is to receive £50mn for an Eden Project of the North, aimed at revitalising tourism to the area.

The offence was picked up after Sunak uploaded the video to Instagram.

However, the announcements were greeted with a series of questions about the fairness of the allocation process for the £2.1bn of funding, including from some MPs and elected mayors from his own Conservative party.

Financial Times analysis showed that £1.2bn — 63 per cent — of the £1.9bn funding going to identifiable constituencies was going to seats held by Sunak’s governing Conservative party. Only 23 per cent was going to seats held by the opposition Labour party.

The Conservative party holds 55 per cent of seats in the UK’s House of Commons, while the Labour party holds 30 per cent.

Andy Street, the Conservative mayor of the West Midlands, was also bitterly critical of the bidding process for allocating funds, after his area largely missed out.

“Fundamentally, this episode is just another example as to why Whitehall’s bidding and begging bowl culture is broken,” he said in a statement.