Monday, January 19, 2009

Driving Licences

A circulated email told me this. Worth checking.

Unwitting motorists face £1,000 fines as thousands of photocard driving licences expire.

Thousands of motorists are at risk of being fined up to £1,000 because they are unwittingly driving without a valid licence.

They risk prosecution after failing to spot the extremely small print on their photocard licence which says it automatically expires after 10 years and has to be renewed - even though drivers are licensed to drive until the age of 70.

The fiasco has come to light a decade after the first batch of photo licences was issued in July 1998, just as they start to expire.

Motoring organisations blamed the Government for the fiasco and said 'most' drivers believed their licences were for life.

A mock-up driving licence from 1998 when the photocards were launched shows the imminent expiry date as item '4b.'

They said officials had failed to publicise sufficiently the fact that new-style licences - unlike the old paper ones - expire after a set period and have to be renewed.

To rub salt into wounds, drivers will have to a pay £17.50 to renew their card - a charge which critics have condemned as a 'stealth tax' and which will earn the Treasury an estimated £437 million over 25 years.

Official DVLA figures reveal that while 16,136 expired this summer, so far only 11,566 drivers have renewed, leaving 4,570 outstanding.

With another 300,000 photocard licences due to expire over the coming year, experts fear the number of invalid licences will soar, putting thousands more drivers in breach of the law and at risk of a fine.

At the heart of the confusion is the small print on the tiny credit-card-size photo licence, which is used in conjunction with the paper version.

Just below the driver name on the front of the photocard licence is a series of dates and details - each one numbered.

Number 4b features a date in tiny writing, but no explicit explanation as to what it means.

The date's significance is only explained if the driver turns over the card and reads the key on the back which states that '4b' means 'licence valid to'.

Even more confusingly, an adjacent table on the rear of the card sets out how long the driver is registered to hold a licence - that is until his or her 70th birthday.

A total of 25million new-style licences have been issued but - motoring experts say - drivers were never sufficiently warned they would expire after 10 years.

Motorists who fail to renew their licences in time are allowed to continue driving. But the DVLA says they could be charged with 'failing to surrender their licence', an offence carrying a £1,000 fine.

AA president, Edmund King said: 'It is not generally known that photocard licences expire: there appears to be a lack of information that people will have to renew these licences.'

6 comments:

Caroline Too said...

... I guess that this all links to identity cards. Since the photo-license is used to confirm our identity (with the piccie), I guess that it makes sense to renew it occasionally...

I very much doubt that the government will make any money out of it all... £437m over a number of years will just about pay for all the extra admin down in Swansea.

Of course, do we really want our money spent that way?

Liz said...

Annoying though it is to have to pay £17.50 to get a new card I had a letter from the DVLA when mine was due for renewal so the fine can be avoided!

Anonymous said...

Thanks St, I've just checked mine and it expires 04-10-09!
Liz - did you have to provide a new photo as well?

Matt Wilson said...

Stealth tax

haha who ever does not have anything more worrying in life to bother with that they need to label 17 pound 50 every ten years justs needs to get out a bit. 1.75 a year or shoot me 15 pence a month 'how very dare they!'

Mike Peatman said...

Thanks for the warning, Steve.

Luckily I just checked and I have until 2012.

Anonymous said...

Cheers for the heads-up Steve. Strangely, my card which I renewed in 2004 expires in 2011. Is it the way I drive?