No more car tax for second-hand motors

The demise of the paper tax disc later this year spells the end of second-hand cars being sold with tax remaining – new owners will always have to pay for vehicle excise duty (VED) immediately instead of being able to take on the vehicle’s existing unexpired tax.

According to the ‘Draft Clauses and Explanatory Notes’ for the proposed Finance Bill 2014:

'…it will no longer be possible to transfer the benefit of a vehicle licence when there is a change of registered keeper. As a consequence of this, where there is a new registered keeper he/she will be obliged to take out a new vehicle licence when the vehicle to which the vehicle licence relates is transferred to him/her. The reason for now preventing vehicle licences being transferred from registered keeper to registered keeper is to avoid a new registered keeper unknowingly keeping an unlicensed vehicle. For example, in the absence of a paper licence a vehicle may be purchased supposedly with the benefit of a vehicle licence. The new keeper would believe that the vehicle was licensed, but the former keeper could apply for a refund of VED without the knowledge of the new keeper resulting on the new keeper having an unlicensed vehicle.'

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End of the road for the tax disc

They have graced the windscreens of cars for almost 100 years, but with police now able to use number plate-reading cameras to access driver and vehicle details, the paper tax disc will, from October 2014, be consigned to history.

The paper tax disc may go more or less unnoticed day to day, but it is no less an example of transport iconography as the Routemaster bus, London taxi or underground map.

Its design, which boasts the perforated edges of a stamp and the watermarks and embossing akin to a banknote, makes the tax disc a far more evocative piece of car culture than, say, the modern-day driving license, MOT or V5 car registration document. .

What could have been: A tax disc for the future

The paper vehicle excise license disc should not be retained for reasons of nostalgia. Instantaneous access by police car and roadside-mounted ANPR (automatic number plate recognition) cameras has rendered them all but redundant. However, perhaps the paper disc could have evolved to embrace new technology rather than be supplanted by it.

It would be altogether feasible for a new generation of disc to double up as a primitive event data recorder – a black box of sorts that would record a vehicle’s speed in the event of a collision. Micro GPS receivers are now commonplace in smart phones and the technology is already incorporated into many vehicles equipped with an airbag. Unfortunately, in the event of a crash, investigators do not have access to the valuable data collected in this way.

Black boxes are fitted by law to airliners and are used to better understand the events before and during a crash. They are an accepted part of air travel, but despite the fact that the movements of anyone with a mobile phone can be tracked, the notion of recording the speed and exact of a car in order to hold its driver to account in the event of a crash is considered a step towards a Big Brother society.

Such concerns are unfounded. A data event recorder can be constantly recording but need only save information in the event of a collision.

A new design of tax disc for the twenty-first century could have become a tamper-proof windscreen sticker that incorporated microchips - a cheap and fast means of implementing black box technology.