Friday, January 26, 2007
You can escape the DVLA computer
We've all heard the adverts on the radio, the machine type voice pretending to be the DVLA computer, informing us of the inevitability of detection if you evade your road tax.
Of course the advert itself is evidence against infallibility, after all if the system was so good, you wouldn't need to advertise it. Everyone who wasn't taxed would be caught and fined, rendering the adverts a waste of money.
The Times tells a different story: The number of people not paying their road tax has almost doubled in the past two years creating a “motoring underclass” of two million drivers who can escape speeding fines, parking penalties and driving convictions.
Some of the report contains statements of the obvious: "Cars and vans that are more than ten years old are five times more likely to be untaxed than those less than ten years old..." Yes well, if you've just spent a small fortune on a vehicle, chances are you can afford the road tax and insurance. If you have little money the temptation is going to be far greater. Anyway with the sky high cost of road tax, it might cost more to tax the vehicle that it cost to buy.
Now I don't condone this activity, because of course it has consequences, which will impact on innocent victims. If you don't tax your vehicle, you won't MOT it, certainly not with the computerised MOT system, because then you can be traced to a garage or an area, and you probably won't have insurance either, and these contribute to making the roads less safe and increasing insurance premiums for law abiding road users. Of course by ironic logic, the increasing insurance premiums will tempt more people to evade road tax: “As motoring becomes more expensive, the groups least able to afford it who need a car are finding it more difficult to make ends meet.”
How does it happen? Simple, when people are purchasing vehicles, they're not filling out the ownership details, or they're providing false ones. The much-vaunted DVLA computer is as much use as a chocolate teapot in cases like this.
It is however a good example of unintended consequences, the DVLA used to have a fairly accurate record of what was what, people would send in the registration documents, etc. As a result, some civil servants/politicians no doubt thought look we can use camera and computer enforcement for many things such as speeding and road tax offences and we'll even tighten up the loophole where people might take their car off the road for a small period of time and gain a month in the road tax stakes, so we'll take even more money off them as well as save on the police.
The result, well nothing is saved on the police, but instead of doing traffic duty: "You can do a journey of 100 miles and you are lucky if you see one police car..." they'll be doing racism class or some other politically correct office activity. What of the people, well it's clear, rather than fill out a form and help the government, they take the risk of not bothering, saving themselves a small fortune each year, but costing the rest of us in increased premiums and decreased road safety.
Road tax should be kept to a fairly small figure say about £30.00 per annum, whenever you purchase road tax, you need to show a valid MOT and insurance. Any revenue from road tax simply isn't worth the high cost of having uninsured untraceable drivers driving cars with no MOTs. The MOT needs to be reduced as well so it only covers safety issues not politically correct pollution concepts or whatever is going through the minister's head. Of course it must be coupled with an increase in traffic police and a decrease in all these cameras everywhere. Simply reducing the tax won't be enough to force those who've gotten away with it, back to the straight and narrow.
Of course the advert itself is evidence against infallibility, after all if the system was so good, you wouldn't need to advertise it. Everyone who wasn't taxed would be caught and fined, rendering the adverts a waste of money.
The Times tells a different story: The number of people not paying their road tax has almost doubled in the past two years creating a “motoring underclass” of two million drivers who can escape speeding fines, parking penalties and driving convictions.
Some of the report contains statements of the obvious: "Cars and vans that are more than ten years old are five times more likely to be untaxed than those less than ten years old..." Yes well, if you've just spent a small fortune on a vehicle, chances are you can afford the road tax and insurance. If you have little money the temptation is going to be far greater. Anyway with the sky high cost of road tax, it might cost more to tax the vehicle that it cost to buy.
Now I don't condone this activity, because of course it has consequences, which will impact on innocent victims. If you don't tax your vehicle, you won't MOT it, certainly not with the computerised MOT system, because then you can be traced to a garage or an area, and you probably won't have insurance either, and these contribute to making the roads less safe and increasing insurance premiums for law abiding road users. Of course by ironic logic, the increasing insurance premiums will tempt more people to evade road tax: “As motoring becomes more expensive, the groups least able to afford it who need a car are finding it more difficult to make ends meet.”
How does it happen? Simple, when people are purchasing vehicles, they're not filling out the ownership details, or they're providing false ones. The much-vaunted DVLA computer is as much use as a chocolate teapot in cases like this.
It is however a good example of unintended consequences, the DVLA used to have a fairly accurate record of what was what, people would send in the registration documents, etc. As a result, some civil servants/politicians no doubt thought look we can use camera and computer enforcement for many things such as speeding and road tax offences and we'll even tighten up the loophole where people might take their car off the road for a small period of time and gain a month in the road tax stakes, so we'll take even more money off them as well as save on the police.
The result, well nothing is saved on the police, but instead of doing traffic duty: "You can do a journey of 100 miles and you are lucky if you see one police car..." they'll be doing racism class or some other politically correct office activity. What of the people, well it's clear, rather than fill out a form and help the government, they take the risk of not bothering, saving themselves a small fortune each year, but costing the rest of us in increased premiums and decreased road safety.
Road tax should be kept to a fairly small figure say about £30.00 per annum, whenever you purchase road tax, you need to show a valid MOT and insurance. Any revenue from road tax simply isn't worth the high cost of having uninsured untraceable drivers driving cars with no MOTs. The MOT needs to be reduced as well so it only covers safety issues not politically correct pollution concepts or whatever is going through the minister's head. Of course it must be coupled with an increase in traffic police and a decrease in all these cameras everywhere. Simply reducing the tax won't be enough to force those who've gotten away with it, back to the straight and narrow.
Tags: tax, DVLA, law and order
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.
Labels: DVLA, law and order, tax
