Illegal Number Plates Fines Issued By Police
Reg Plates ArticleIllegal Number Plates Fines Issued By Police
SURREY has the second-highest number of illegal number plates in the country, and the most behind London, according to new research.
A Freedom of Information request to England’s 39 police forces by personalised number plate company Click4reg .co.uk revealed a whopping 5,395 Brits are driving with an illegal number plate.
The Metropolitan Police predictably came out on top, with 812 people fined and/or prosecuted for displaying an illegal plate last year.
However, perhaps more surprising was that Surrey Police came second on the list, with 494 offenders caught in 2015. Neighbouring Hampshire came sixth on the list, with 218 people falling foul of the law.
The DVLA’s strict regulations stipulate not only that the registration must be two letters, two numbers, a space and three further letters, but also that the correct font, character size and spacing must be used.
Anyone in breach of the regulations, or whose number plate is obscured including by dirt or missing, could not only fail their MOT test, but could be fined up to £1,000.
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.
- FREE TRANSFER SERVICE - your paperwork is handled by our trained team
- OVER 30 YEARS EXPERTISE - long established and trusted company
- DVLA RECOGNISED RESELLER - linked directly from the DVLA website
- TRADE ASSOCIATION MEMBERS - MIRAD and CN Guild members
