Why You Should SORN Your Vehicle With The DVLA

Reg Plates Article

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.

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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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