ABC 1 & 1 ABC Number Plate Sell Off?

The city council should sell-off its mayoral number plates ABC1 and 1ABC and make £55,000, a senior councillor has said.

Labour cabinet member Rory Palmer says the authority should look to selling the plates at a time of massive cuts to departmental budgets.

He said: “£55,000 is a relatively small amount of money for an authority the size of Leicester City Council.

“But there is an issue of how it looks to have two luxury number plates adorning two of the city’s civic cars when people are being made redundant.”

The council did not pay anything for the plates, as they were allocated before centralised registration in 1974. However the plates were valued in March by two independent valuers.

The highest quote for ABC1 was £30,000, the highest for 1ABC was £25,000.

The number plate ABC1 was allocated to the Lord Mayor’s vehicle in January, 1936, to mark the beginning of the ABC series of registration marks in Leicester.

The number plate 1ABC is understood to have been either obtained in a similar way or might even have been given to the council by a private motorist. It came into council possession some time after 1953.

A spokesman said: “We have no immediate plans to discuss the sale of these plates. They are a part of the civic heritage of the city and once sold would be irreplaceable. We do, however, have plans to look at the running costs of the civic vehicles as part of our wider review.”

But Coun Palmer said: “I doubt many people in the city would be aware of the background to how the council obtained the number plates, so we should definitely have a conversation with the people of the city on this subject.

“If the majority of people were in favour of selling them then that’s something we should look at.”

The council said there had been no expressions of interests for the plates, and that the selling of them had never been formally considered.