Recently I had the pleasure of spending a few hours with Dorset Police's road traffic officers. For a few hours on a quiet Wednesday evening shift, we toured Bournemouth and Poole as background for the Daily Echo's Too Young To Die campaign. Though the incidents were relatively low grade, I was staggered by one piece of information.

It's estimated that at any one time in this country, one million people are driving on the roads without insurance.

In Dorset alone last year, the police seized 2,300 vehicles either because they were uninsured or because the driver had no licence or had breached it.

Judging by the national statistics then, these seizures, welcome as they are, simply represent the tip of an enormous iceberg. Indeed, one officer tellingly described picking up uninsured drivers in some parts of the area as like "shooting fish in a barrel."

The insurance issue is just one of the problems on the roads. The level of drink driving - especially the number of young people prepared to take that risk - is also of huge and growing concern. Ask a traffic cop if he thinks there are enough dedicated patrol cars on the road and he'll respond, diplomatically, that there are resource issues for every section of the force.

Car ownership has rocketed in the past 10 years or so, but the number of police officers dedicated to road traffic policing has fallen. Speed cameras may be very useful for the one job they do.

But as is becoming increasingly apparent, the over-reliance on them is leaving an alarming and ever widening gap in enforcement.