AB 1 - Cover Up By Police Chief Or Oversight You Decide

Reg Plates Article

AB 1 - Cover Up By Police Chief Or Oversight You Decide

The controversial sale of a historic car number plate will be examined by councillors following complaints from the public.

The West Mercia Police and Crime Panel will meet on Tuesday February 6 to discuss the sale of the AB1 number plate by the Police and Crime Commissioner John Campion to former Chief Constable Paul West last August.

The Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) said there was no indication of wrongdoing in relation to the sale of 'AB1' and decided against investigating the matter earlier this year, but a number of people have maintained pressure to have the matter investigated.

Former senior police officer Andy Parkes was among more than 800 people who signed a petition against the sale, and he then wrote to the panel asking it to investigate.

He doesn’t think the number plate – the first to be issued to any car in Worcestershire - should have been sold in the first place, and also thinks it was sold for too little.

Mr Parkes, who was a Superintendent in the West Mercia force, said: “That number plate is part of West Mercia Police heritage, and before that Worcestershire Police heritage dating back to the 1930s.

“It’s not something that should be sold.”

But if it was to be sold to fund policing then Mr Parkes thinks there was a duty to sell it for the highest price possible.

It was announced last August that former West Mercia Chief Constable Paul West – whose official car when he was in post would have carried the plate – bought the plate for £160,000, but Jon Cherry, the director of regplates.com, said he had a client who was interested in the plate and would have bid £250,000, although a spokesman for Mr Campion stressed that no such offer was ever lodged.

Mr Parkes said: “Complaints to the IOPC were dismissed, but I still think there are questions to be answered.”

Mr Campion said: “I recognise that this is an emotive subject for some and that those individuals are upset with the decision to sell AB1. I believe that the public support my drive to use the resources at my disposal, including an unused private number plate to support policing and keeping communities safe.”

The Police and Crime panel will meet at 11am at County Hall in Worcester on Tuesday February 6.

Also in the news

Ontario decided that vehicles needed licence plates in 1903, two years after New York became the first state to require such vehicle registration. The first went to department store heir John Craig Eaton of Toronto. His leather plate, with an aluminum number “1” riveted to it, cost him $2.00 and went on his Winton, a car made in Cleveland, Ohio. It was the first of 198 plates the province issued that year.

Edmonton also decided vehicles needed to be registered in 1903, and Joseph Morris was the first with his new Ford. However, he was merely assigned the number, and it was left up to him to display it. The story goes that when he got a ticket for not doing so, he claimed a broomstick he’d stuck upright in the car made the required numero uno. While no one’s sure if that actually happened, Morris did receive Alberta’s first provincially made licence plate nine years later.

Early licence plates were often made out of rubber or leather, with metal numbers on them. In 1911, Ontario made its plates out of porcelain, but they were easily broken, and the province went to steel plates the following year. When motorists still had to make their own plates, some mail-order companies sold do-it-yourself kits.

During the Second World War, metal was prioritized for the war effort, and some municipalities had to find something else to use for licences. A few states, primarily Illinois and Montana, used a cardboard-like material made from pressed soybean fibre. It worked well under most circumstances, but some rural motorists reported that their plates had been eaten by livestock.

Some licensing departments issued paper stickers that went on the windshield to indicate the plate had been renewed during the war years, since almost all of them issued brand-new plates each year. Others issued small metal renewal tags that were clipped to the old plates.

How close a series of letters or numbers are to a real name of word: if the match quality is high (and the numbers and letters are very convincing in making a popular word), the value of the registration plate will be higher. This means that a match like 5IMON, for the name Simon, will be worth a lot more than a more obscure set of letters and numbers that are not as convincing a match, such as S17 MMM for the name Sam.

The style of the plate: this means establishing if it is a new-style plate, an older-style format or if it is dateless or Irish, for instance. Other options are that it is a prefix-style plate or a suffix-style plate. New-style number plates, which have been produced since 2001, tend to be the least valuable because they are a bit less appealing to some collectors, plus the rule about not having plates that are newer than your car can also come into play, putting people off from buying a newer-style plate for their older car. Prefix-style number plates, which were in production between 1983 and 2001 can be more popular as more vehicles are entitled to have those licence numbers, and they may have fewer characters in total. Suffix-style plates, issued from 1963 to 1983 are relatively rare, which means they can attract higher prices than prefix-style plates and newer designs. Dateless number plates, also known as cherished number plates, were produced between 1903 and 1963 and are nearly always the most valuable number plate configurations; they have fewer digits and their dateless nature means that people can hide the age of their car. Irish number plates are similar to dateless number plates, especially because they don’t have a year identifier. They also tend to be cheaper than other types of vehicle registration plates.

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