Personal Registration Number Plate

It doesn’t matter what kind of car you drive, its appearance will be smartened up by a personal number plate. Whether it’s your initials as part of a dateless registration or the type of car you drive that’s on display, a carefully chosen plate will make your car that bit more personal to you.

Unfortunately you’ll have to put your hand in your pocket if you want to acquire a personal plate, but the good news is that if you buy something with wider appeal, it could prove to be quite an investment.

Take a look at the DVLA Personalised Registrations website  and you’ll see that prices start at £250, including VAT and all fees. The problem is, the DVLA doesn’t put its best numbers up for general sale; they’re always reserved for one of its auctions where they’re likely to achieve a higher price.

Buy from a DVLA auction and on top of the hammer price you’ll also have to cough up for the VAT, buyer’s premium and assignment fee (£80). Don’t forget this, because what can seem like quite a cheap plate can turn out to be significantly more expensive. That £250 cost soon balloons to £428 at auction; a hammer price of £2,000 equates to £2,672 all-in, while you’ll be facing a bill of £6,560 if you bid a plate up to £5,000.

You don’t have to buy at auction though, as there’s a stack of number plate dealers out there. Some are represented by the Cherished Numbers Dealer Association but many aren’t; the DVLA also lists several.

Dealers will usually have plates of their own for sale alongside those they’re selling on behalf of customers – that’s why you have to pay VAT on some numbers but not on others. Buy from a dealer and it couldn’t be simpler as they’ll sort out all of the paperwork for you. Not that it’s especially difficult now; in March 2015 the DVLA introduced a new online system for assigning registration numbers.

Thanks to this new system, swapping the plate on your car has never been easier or quicker. While the DVLA still sticks to its previous advice – which is to allow two to three weeks before you can fit your new plates – the reality is that it often takes little more than a week for everything to be sorted.

It’s perfectly legal for individuals to sell cherished numbers too, but if you buy directly from someone you’ll have to sort out the plate transfer yourself – although it’s not difficult. What you do need to do is ensure the person who is selling the plate is entitled to it – there’s nothing to stop someone from claiming they own a plate when in fact they don’t.

The answer is to ask them for their Certificate of Entitlement (V750), which is an ownership document issued by the DVLA, a bit like a V5C. The seller would have this along with their retention certificate (V778) if the plate isn’t already on a car, but if it, just make sure that the V5C (the car’s registration document) is in their name and check that the address on this is the one that you visit when negotiating to buy.

If you buy a plate and have a V750 in your own name, you need to make sure it doesn’t expire, which it will after 12 months. Once it’s expired you’ll have to have a good reason to get the DVLA to reinstate your number (‘I forgot’ won’t cut it), and if they won’t, you’ve lost your number unless it comes up for sale and you buy it again.

You can:

• Buy a registration and keep it on a retention certificate (V778) rather than assign it to a car. You might want to do this if the registration you’re buying is too new for your car. More on the DVLA blog
• Buy a personal plate only for cars registered within mainland Great Britain and Northern Ireland – but not the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man.

You can’t:

• Put a registration on your car that makes it look younger than it is. For more on this, check out our recent blog on how the UK car registration system works 
• Assign a personal number to a car with a Q-registration.
• Take the registration number off a car that hasn’t been taxed or MoTed within the last six months. Any car that you’re assigning a number to must also be taxed.
• Misrepresent your plate once it’s on your car, by using weird spacings, fonts or fixings. If you do, the plate can be withdrawn and you can fined up to £1,000, so read the rules before you buy.

By the way:

• If your vehicle is stolen and hasn’t been recovered after a year you can apply to have its number reassigned to your replacement vehicle. However, the theft must have been notified to the police and recorded at DVLA as stolen for not less than 12 months. Also, when the vehicle was stolen it must have been taxed and MoTed. The DVLA requires a letter from your insurer confirming it has no objection to the number being re-issued; once insurers have settled your claim, they have a rightful claim to the vehicle should it be recovered.
• If your car is written off, it becomes the property of your insurer when they settle your claim. As a result you’ll need to transfer the number to another car, or put it on a retention certificate, if you don’t want to lose it.
• If you want to retain a number, make sure you transfer it from your car if you sell it. Once the car is registered to someone else, or if it’s scrapped, destroyed or exported, your entitlement to the number ceases.

Richard Dredge

October 2015