Why You Should SORN Your Vehicle With The DVLA

The acronym SORN stands for ‘Statutory Off Road Notification’. It’s a declaration made by the owner of a registered vehicle confirming they’re removing their car from the public highway. By doing so you’re no longer required to pay road tax. Essentially, you’re informing the DVLA a vehicle is registered but not in use.

You might want to declare a car SORN if you’ve bought a ‘project car’ that’s going to be parked off the road while you work on it or if an accident or mechanical issue has rendered your car undrivable and you need a bit of time to get the funds together for repairs. Basically, if you’re taking you’re taking a car off the road, a SORN is the way to save the money you would have spent on road tax and insurance.

Fortunately, you can head to the DVLA website and carry out the declaration whenever, avoiding delays while you post the forms or stand in the agonising queue at a DVLA branch. Should your insurance and road tax expire and you haveno intent to renew them, you can let the authorities know without much hassle. The whole process can even be carried out over the phone.

As the name suggests, once declared SORN, your car must be off the road and stored in a garage or kept on private land.In the eyes of the law, there’s no difference between a regularly used car and one that’s been parked curbside for years. If it’s on the road, it must be taxed and it must be insured. Revisions to taxation and insurance laws have been brought in to weed out uninsured and untaxed road users. The knock-on effect has seen the Government handing out fines to negligent owners without either certification on a more regular basis.

Unfortunately the DVLA does not extend a grace period once your tax has lapsed. You must SORN your vehicle immediately. The DVLA runs constant checks, cross-referencing untaxed vehicles with the national insurance database which will also flag-up those without cover.

If your road tax expires, the DVLA assumes that your vehicle is the off the road but you’ve yet to notify them. Subsequently a warning letter will drop through the door, ignore it and an automatic £80 penalty for no road tax will follow, or £100 if your car’s uninsured. Should you be found driving the car without road tax you can be prosecuted.

Neglect the fine and you’ll find yourself standing before a magistrate who could raise the fine to £1000 – plus court costs – for either tax or insurance infringements . Waiting for the warning letter is a risky game, the DVLA aren’t obliged to remind you of your infraction, you’re solely responsible and thus liable to be fined.

When you must make a SORN declaration

If you buy a car and do not tax and insure it immediately. Tax is no longer tied to the vehicle and is void during a change of ownership.
If you purchase a car that’s already on the SORN register. You must reapply.
If your road tax expires and your car is the off the road for more than 14 days.
If your car is not insured.
If you break your car for parts, or scrap it.

So what are the top selling number plates in the UK? The DVLA has been selling private plates to UK motorists since 1989. During this time, there have been a number of records set, but most of the top 10 have been bought in the past 15 years. Here’s what currently makes the list:

25 0 – A Ferrari dealer bought this for £518k in 2014. It is now on a £10 million Ferrari 250 SWB.
F 1 – A businessman, Afzal Khan, bought this for £440k in 2008 and put it on his McLaren-Mercedes SLR.
S 1 – This was bought in 2008 for £404k by an anonymous buyer.
1 D – Businessman Nabil Bishara bought this plate in 2009 (before One Direction was formed, so it is not a reference to the band) for £352k.
M 1 – Businessman Mike McCoomb bought this number plate in 2006 for £331k, apparently for his son, who was 10 at the time.
VIP 1 – Chelsea owner and businessman Roman Abramovich bought this plate for £285k in 2006.
51 NGH – This number plate, which looks like the surname Singh, was sold in 2006 for £254k.
1 RH – Businessman Robert Haverson bought this in 2006 for £247k.
K1 NGS – This reg plate, which looks like the word “kings”, was bought anonymously in 1993 for £231k.
1 0 – This very simple but striking number plate was bought anonymously in 2009 for £170k.

These are large amounts of money, but they are all small compared to the top-selling number plates found in other parts of the world. Abu Dhabi, in the UAE, has the record for the most expensive number plate ever sold. That number plate was a simple “1”. It was bought in 2008 by businessman Saeed Abdul Ghaffar Khouri for £7.25 million.

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