Less paperwork for the motorists
Many car owners are unaware that the tax disc, that piece of paper which shows you have paid the annual road usage charge, will be replaced by an electronic system on 1st October.
Vehicle tax was introduced in the UK all the way back in 1888, when it applied to horse-drawn carriages. Motorised vehicle tax discs date back to 1921 and for almost 100 years now it has been a requirement that an up to date disc is displayed in the bottom right corner of the windshield, (although no equivalent requirement existed in the UK to display proof of MOT or Insurance). Drivers of open-top cars and riders of motorcycles discovered it is all too easy for thieves to steal their tax disks from unattended vehicles.
Until recent times, obtaining a tax disc often meant queueing up in the post office, clutching an MOT and Insurance certificate, but in a good example of progressive computerisation, the system was first changed so that post offices could check details online, without the need for certificates, and then the system was put onto the web so that renewing the tax disc became a five minute job.
However, that still left the weak link in the chain, that the disc had to be delivered by post, and you had to remember to put it in the car, replacing the old one. That opens up a myriad of excuses such as claiming the paperwork is in the post and, in this age of the cheap scanner and inkjet, for people to print convincing forgeries,
All that changes though with computers and connectivity. Police cars and roadside cameras can be fitted with automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) which can routinely check vehicles to ensure they are taxed, insured, have an up to date MOT, and are not reported stolen. There really is no need anymore for people to have a paper disc in the vehicle, and a streamlined system should prove easier for everyone and save money in admin costs. Just the cost of paper and postage is estimated to save at least £10 million per year and the DVLA says it wants to continue making the system easier to pay, harder to avoid.
Not everyone is happy though. Some critics have said this will make it easier for thieves to clone vehicles, which means stealing a car and then affixing false plates which correspond to a legitimate car of the same model and colour. One clue to cloning is that the tax disc would not show the same registration as the forged number-plates, a discrepancy which might be spotted by a passing police officer or traffic warden. However, that's a pretty weak argument, and perhaps the next stage in combating theft is to require new vehicles to contain embedded RFID devices which replicate the vehicle's VIN plate number and which would allow much better automated checking.
The RAC has also been a surprising critic of the new system and it claims that not needing to display a tax disc will make it harder to enforce and lead to increased tax evasion amounting to some £167 million per year. It is not clear where the RAC obtained this figure from, but DVLA chief Oliver Morley rebutted this argument by pointing out that there has never been a requirement for a TV licence to be displayed in your living room window, but the TV licensing system is still enforced.
29th September 2014
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.