The Government is losing control of our roads. Tomorrow evening on Tonight With Trevor McDonald the program will highlight a growing underclass of illegal motorists that has grown to the biggest on record.

After investigating the problem of uninsured drivers, you come away gravely concerned that as many as two million people routinely drive around the UK with no insurance, licence or MoT.

Such an appalling statistic makes it hard to argue that current levels of enforcement and penalties work. You don't have to look far to find persistent offenders.

One woman was interviewed admitted to driving uninsured for an astonishing 32 years - because she claimed she could not afford insurance. We secretly filmed a driver with 112 convictions and 56 disqualifications brazenly driving off in his Ford Mondeo.

When we showed him pictures of himself behind the wheel, he wasn't remorseful or remotely concerned that every day of his life he drives illegally. But the Government's weapon against uninsured drivers, the long-awaited national computer database of all insured vehicles, is flawed and inaccurate. Automatic Number Plate Recognition Cameras capture the registration numbers of passing cars and check them against the police database.

But we saw dozens of mis-reads, false alerts and wrong number plate matches. A traffic officer we spoke to reckons that 10 per cent of all alerts on the ANPR system are mis-reads. We filmed a perfectly innocent nurse being wrongly stopped by police ANPR cameras for having no insurance. In fact, she had fully comprehensive cover. Close to tears, she was minutes away from having her car seized and potentially crushed.

And the threat of crushing uninsured cars hasn't proved enough of a deterrent, either. Over half the cars seized by the police and destined for the crusher are saved by a glaring loophole that allows anybody who has valid insurance to reclaim the car and drive it away.

The police stated there's a man in Nottingham who actually runs a business exploiting this loophole and is being paid to save scores of uninsured drivers' cars from the crusher. Last year uninsured drivers killed 150 people and injured another 12,000. They're involved in one in four of all crashes and are eight times as likely to have an accident than drivers with insurance.

But with the number of traffic cops falling by 40 per cent since 1997, getting caught is increasingly rare. And with the average fine for those caught running at £150 (compared with the average cost of insurance of £500) we shouldn't be surprised so many drivers flout the law.

Stephen Ladyman, Minister of State for Transport, agrees that the penalties aren't enough and is lobbying for a system of continuous insurance. But until that happens, the number of uninsured drivers in the UK will continue broadly unchecked. And who knows, next year the number could mushroom to three million.

Unless the Government stops compromising the nation's road safety with its dogged reliance on speed cameras and puts more police cars on our roads, the motoring underclass will threaten us all.

DRIVERS Uncovered: Tonight With Trevor McDonald is on ITV1 13 Nov 8pm.

Anyone who is caught with no insurance or no tax or MOT should have their car confiscated and then the proceeds from the sales of the cars or their scrapping can help make roads safer