Abolishing the Tax disc

So next month the Vehicle tax disc will be abolished in favour of a fully digital system. There are good and bad things about this;

Firstly, the fact that you will no longer need to display a tax disc is a good thing. It always confused me that it was an offence not to display a disc regardless of whether or not you’d paid for your car tax. The automatic recognition system that the police and the traffic authority use has been able to tell whether you have tax by looking at your registration plate for years. So you can now drive safe in the knowledge that you’ll be able to drive as soon as you’ve paid tax and not have to wait for a new disc to be delivered.

However, as with every change their seems to be (by any government, to any form of tax) there are a couple of bad things being forced through with it. The biggest of which is that tax can no longer be transferred to a new owner. If you are selling your car privately, you will have to cancel the tax, and then reclaim it at the end of the tax year.

Firstly, this is a tactic that the Coalition government have used a lot. Yes, they have to give the money back, but until April of the year after the car is sold, they get to hold onto the money and make it appear as though the Treasury is far more healthy than it actually is, as not only do they have the cancelled tax money to hold in their account, they also have the new tax which the new owner of the car will have to pay instantly.

On that point, in order to pay tax on a vehicle, you must be the registered owner of that vehicle. This is done through changing the name and address on the vehicle’s V5 document; a process that takes 6-8 weeks for the DVLA to process. So what they seem to be suggesting here is if you buy a car from anywhere other than a dealership, you could be facing as a long as two months of not being able to tax it.

It’s almost like the government is trying (under the guise of getting rid of an old piece of bureaucracy) to make it appear as though the UK second hand car market (made of dealerships) is being stimulated by their policies, when really it’s just through unfair changes to the law. Oh wait, actually it’s exactly like that.

The only way that you will be able to sell your car, without knocking off a massive chunk of the value, on account of the lost tax and the inconvenience of having to wait for a new V5, is if you do it through a dealership and pay them a percentage on top of it.

There is absolutely no need to have a physical tax disc is the modern world; there hasn’t been for a long time, but the idea the idea of car tax not being transferable doesn’t make any sense and is simply there to make the government look better than it is.