Personalised Number Plates For Everyone?

Like Marmite and Jedward, personalised number plates are one of life’s great dividers, you either love ‘em or hate ‘em.

Thanks to a new survey from insurers Elephant, we now know that down here in Dorset, in Sandbanks, they can’t get enough of them.

After Inverclyde, west of Glasgow, where 14 per cent of the population sport this type of number plate, Sandbanks is England’s personalised numberplate capital, with 13 per cent of the population owning one.

No surprise there, you might say.

Or, indeed, to learn that Bentley Continental drivers are most likely to own one, with 36% carrying a personalised plate.

This is followed by the Ferrari 360 and Aston Martin DB7 where 35 per cent of those owners are likely to have one.

The motorists least likely to have one? The person who drives a Suzuki Liana.

But, as Elephant has discovered over the years, as they regularly survey more than 3 million policies, personalised plates are not just the preserve of self-made millionaires, pop stars and celebrity wide-boy former council leaders (and yes, we do mean you, Derek Hatton, with your DEG5Y plate.) According to the insurer’s managing director, Brian Martin, past research has thrown up some surprising results.

“It’s not just people with high-powered occupations living in swanky postcode areas, who own them,” he said. “Occupations at the top of the list include farriers, newsagents and construction machinery operators and many of the postcode areas with the highest percentage are in rural areas, lots of them in Scotland.”