Tag Archives: Car Tax

Computers/Technology, Transport, Web/Internet

Off to the Post Office for Us…

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One of the most popular posts on the blog is my post of a couple of years ago about the DVLA online vehicle registration. However whilst I have always been able to register one of our cars using the service, the other has always had an old style form. However last week a new style form turned up.

The online service isn’t available until the fifteenth of the renewal month, so yesterday afternoon I dug out the paperwork and tried to register.

The process makes use of a database of MOT tests and the insurers database in order to validate that your car has a valid MOT and insurance, however that hits a bit of a problem. If like us your insurance and MOT expire at around the same time as the car tax is due the database will report that insurance is not valid. You then get a helpful screen suggesting that you try again once the new policy is in place – in our case that is four days before the end of the month which doesn’t give enough time for the tax disc to be delivered. Effectively we’re stuck with having to renew at the post office since we can’t drive the car without the tax disc, but the online service won’t renew until the insurance company database updates. The Motor Insurance Information Centre themselves admit that this is a problem on their site.

Thinking about it about the only way to avoid the problem would be to get six months road tax this time around to offset the online renewal.

Cars, Web/Internet

My DVLA Online Vehicle Registration Experiences

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The Vehicle Licence Application form for the Golf turned up in the post today, however since the last time we taxed a car, it seems that the DVLA have taken a step forward. Rather than have to go and queue up in a local post office to get a tax disc, the envelope and renewal form were plugging the chance to pay your car tax online.

It has to be said that in typical fashion the URL they are putting all over the renewal document is currently wrong – http://www.direct.gov.uk/taxdisc producing a ‘Document contains no data.’ error. However it looks like this is only a problem with the redirect, a bit of digging around located http://www.vehiclelicence.gov.uk/, which is the site itself. (www.direct.gov.uk is the central site for government services, but it is really just a collection of links to the individual departmental sites.)

Anyway, the one obstacle I thought there would be to an online service is that the trip to the post office to tax a car has a second purpose, which is for someone official to check that each vehicle has valid insurance and if over three years old, has passed it’s MOT test. However these checks are actually done automatically during the online process by checking details against the Motor Insurance Database run by the Motor Insurers Information Centre to combat the problem of uninsured drivers, and the MOT details can be validated as a result of the new computerised MOT testing processes.

It’s a lot quicker, and is also available 24 hours a day. Essentially all you need to do is type in your reference number or car registration number, select 6 or 12 months tax, and type in a debit card number, so no more queues in the Post Office at lunchtime for me!