Personal Registrations

According to the DVLA, around one in 10 cars on UK roads now wears a personal registration plate. When the registration A1 was issued in London at the end of 1903, Earl Russell queued all night outside the London County Council offices to secure it – so for well over a century there’s been a following for interesting car registrations.

Nowadays it’s easier than ever to put a personal registration onto your car, whether you’ve got lots of money to spend, or just a little bit. If you just want to give your car a plate that catches your eye but isn’t likely to be of much to interest to anyone else, you can pick something up from just £50. But read on and you’ll see you can spend rather more than this if you want to really make your car stand out…

How the UK car registration system works

The first registrations issued in the UK featured one or two letters and anywhere between one and four numbers (AB 1234). By the 1930s many of the combinations had been used up so a new system had to be conjured up – and that was to introduce an extra letter with up to three numbers (ABC 123).

Once these combinations were starting to get used up in the 1950s this system also had to be reversed (to become 123 ABC). It’s these registrations which tend to be the most readily available from the wide array of number plate dealers now trading across the country. To find one, check out the Cherished Numbers Dealer Association (CNDA).

While registration numbers are allocated centrally by the DVLA, every one issued will be registered to a specific part of the country depending on where the car it’s assigned to is located. So although the characters on a plate may seem completely random – apart from the year identifier – there’s more of a system than you might think.

Taking the original layout (AB 1234), the two letters gave away where in the UK the registration was issued. When a third letter was added, it was still the last two letters which denoted where the car was registered.

Farewell to the dateless registrations

Registrations issued before 1963 are seen as dateless because they didn’t have a letter at the end to give away when they were issued. In 1963 the suffix arrived (ABC 123 D) and this system continued until 1983 when the prefix system was introduced (A 123 BCD). The last two letters of the three-letter sequence still denoted where in the UK the car was registered.

Because not all areas adopted the prefix system until 1965, some dateless registrations continued to be issued after 1963. But generally, cars registered from 1 January 1963 were allocated a plate that ended with an ‘A’; a year later it would be a ‘B’, then a ‘C’ and so on. However, just to confuse things the E-plate arrived on 1 January 1967 but the F-plate came on 1 August 1967 because from this point on the new plate would always hit on 1 August.

In 2001 a new registration system was introduced (AB 51 CDE) with two changes each year. The first of the new registrations arrives on 1 March with the number being the same as the year (so 15 for 2015). When the second new reg of the year hits on 1 September, you just add 50 to the number, which is why the 65-plate came out recently.

Because it didn’t arrive until September 2001, there were no 50-plates issued – we started at 51. This system was designed so that in 2050 when all of the options have been used up, everything can be reversed (to become ABC 51 DE) and we’ll then have another half-century of registrations ready to go.

With the current system the first two letters denote where in the UK the car is registered while the two numbers give away when it was issued; the final three letters are random. You can find out where and when any of the current registrations was issued on the DVLA website , but bear in mind that it’s no longer nearly as obvious if a current-system number is of the regular or personal variety.

The idea of the current system is that it gives us two registrations each year to even out the sales spike that always used to hit at the time of the new registration being released. We like to be seen in a car with the latest registration here in the UK, so when the new registration used to be issued on 1 August, dealerships across the country had to put up with a large proportion of their annual sales having to be delivered on one day of the year.

When putting a personal registration onto your car, you can assign any number you like, as long as the registration doesn’t make the car appear newer than it is. So if you have a 2005 car you can put on a 1990 registration for example, but not one from 2010.

In a couple of weeks we’ll be looking at how you can assign a personal registration to your car. By leaving it for a little while, it should give you time to have a hunt underneath the furniture for all the cash you’ve lost over the years, so you can invest in your own personal registration.

Ÿ For more on the history of registration numbers in the UK, check out this page on the Chiltern Vehicle Preservation Group website

The UK’s most expensive number plates

25 O: £518,000 (November 2014)

1 D:  £352,000 (March 2009)

51 NGH: £254,000 (April 2006)

1 RH: £247,000 (November 2008)

K1 NGS: £231,000 (December 1993)

 
Richard Dredge
October 2015