OT; Is it taxed?

[The Medway Handyman]

Saying to Mrs Handyman only today that, with the new 'disc less' road tax system, if you see a car parked up you wouldn't know if it were taxed or not.

But you can find out;

[Brian Gaff]

Yes, but who is going to bother to do all that when in the old system an untaxed car was pretty obvious unless the person was into forgery. Brian

[Adrian]

And what sort of net-curtain-twitcher would have walked past parked cars peering at the tax discs anyway?

[Robin]

People who couldn't park near their house because of cars[1] which appeared and then did not move for days, and were suspected of being dumped/TWOC'd? (And I thought this group was generally in favour of DIY rather than leaving everything to "professionals" - in this case from DVLA etc.)

[Martin Brown]

The lack of any paperwork does leave you with an interesting conundrum if as happened to me recently the car tax renewal reminder was lost in the post. You can however renew using only info gleaned from a V5c.

Having a dated tax disc in the car acts as a useful reminder to do it.

Not having any kind of official paper receipt now is a bit odd though.

Had a good one elsewhere when printing a receipt to Adobe PDF. I don't know what went wrong but only the numbers and punctuation remained unmolested the text looked like Klingon when I came to print it out!

[Chris J Dixon]

I got a similar feeling when a courier recently collected a damaged item I was returning. I scribbled on his hand-held device, and that action was my only "proof" that he had taken it from me.

Chris

[Mike Barnes]

It's situations like that where a camera phone comes in handy.

[Adrian]

Ah, the old "I have priority when it comes to parking outside my house" brigade.

Your footnote was TWOCd, too, I think. It'll probably be found, burnt- out, at the end of somebody else's post.

[Robin]

Nice try but completely misses the target. There was thankfully very little of that around here. More the "it'd be nice to be able to unload

10 bags of sand without carrying them 50 metres brigade". And on one occasion "it'd be nice for the roofer if the wagon could drop the Eternits, battens, felt, etc in the front yard brigade".

In any event, coming back to the issue, I am unclear what objection you have to residents who report untaxed cars - especially when neighbours have no idea of the car's owner?

[fred]

Or ask the courier to sign a receipt you have created yourself.

Not reasonable to ask them to sign eg. Received 500quid mobile phone, only Received, box approx , addressed to as they have no evidence of what is in the package.

I haven't been refused a sig yet.

[Huge]

Adrian's too stupid to read a whole sentence. He is, after all, a socialist.

[Adrian]

Nice try, but wrong.

[ARW]

dennis and AICMFP:-)

[hugh]

If you see one parked in the same place for weeks on end then a quick look would have been in order.

[hugh]

A communist?

[Chris French]

In message , Brian Gaff writes

Why would they need to bother anyway.

DVLA know which cars are taxed and which aren't anyway - see all the stories in the press at the moment re car owners getting clamped/fined etc because they didn't realise the tax was cancelled once a car was sold.

[Adrian]

Then it's not too much of a stretch to make a mental note of the plate and check it on vehicleenquiry.service.gov.uk and askmid.co.uk - which'll give you three times the information of a tax disk alone.

[Adrian]

Even wronger.

[Big Les Wade]

Isn't that illegal if you're not the owner?

[Adrian]

"Illegal"? Well, MID do give it the big fat scary on data protection. I'm terrified, frankly.

Is whether a particular car registration insured or not "personal data"? Let's be charitable and say it's "debatable". And MID'd be committing the same offence.

B'sides, if somebody was checking because of a vehicle they believed to be dumped or uninsured, there's a strong argument that it's "in the public interest" or even "necessary for the purpose of detecting crime".