From October 1st 2014, you will no longer have to display your paper tax disc on your windscreen. This is due to the advancements in police technology - meaning that they can check if your car is taxed by just running your number plate through their scanners. You can also apply online to get your vehicle taxed using a 16 digit reference number from your vehicle tax renewal reminder (V11) or your 11 digit reference number from your log book (V5C). In addition to all of this, you can check the tax status of any vehicle online - this can be used for rental cars as well as privately owned cars.
In other news, the vehicle identity check (VIC) scheme for all cars written off, that are of roadworthy condition, has been scrapped. This was announced by the Transport Minister: Stephen Hammond. These checks were introduced in 2003 to reduce the amount of car theft in the UK.
For the vast majority of people that don't know about these, basically if you had fixed a car that had been previously written off, it had to pass a VIC to be legally driven on public roads. This was due to criminals taking cars that had been written off, stealing another car and switching the number plates, so that they could sell the written off car and the roadworthy car wouldn't show up as being written off, so could also be sold. The VIC scheme was introduced to try and prevent this from happening, but according to Hammond, there hasn't been enough success to warrant the amount of money spent on the scheme.
Hopefully car crime won't rise due to this and there will be some other prevention tactics being implemented ASAP.
No comments:
Post a Comment