Can police check your phone at a traffic stop?

A traffic stop under s.163 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 gives a constable in uniform the power to require a driver to stop. Under s.164, the officer can require production of your driving licence. Under s.165, they can require production of insurance and MOT documentation. These powers relate only to driving documents.

The power to stop your vehicle does not include a power to search you, your vehicle, or your belongings without separate grounds. If an officer suspects you have been using your phone while driving (an offence under regulation 110 of the Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986, as amended), they may have grounds to arrest you if the offence was committed in their presence.

However, using a phone while driving is typically dealt with by a fixed penalty notice (6 points and a £200 fine since 2022) without arrest. The officer does not need to examine your phone to issue the penalty: the observation of you holding and using the device is sufficient.

If the officer has reasonable grounds to suspect a more serious offence (e.g., causing death by dangerous driving while using a phone), they may arrest you and seize the phone as evidence under PACE s.19. Even then, accessing the data on the phone requires separate authority.

The position was clarified in R v Bater-James and Mohammed [2020], where the Court of Appeal distinguished between the physical seizure of a device and the extraction of data from it. Simply having your phone in their hands during a traffic stop does not give police the right to look through its contents.

You can decline a request to hand over or unlock your phone at a traffic stop. There is no obligation to do so unless the officer has a specific legal power (such as arrest followed by seizure under PACE, or a RIPA s.49 notice for password disclosure).