I changed the engine in my little sports car to a different type and size (Reliant 850 to Suzuki 993). I sent off supporting receipts and a covering letter. I asked that they returned the receipts.
A new V5C (registration document) arrived in due course, showing the new engine serial number but the receipts were not included and never came back.
It wasn’t until some time later that I realised that they had not changed the CC from 850 to 993. I sent the document back with another covering letter, pointing out their mistake. It was returned a couple of weeks later saying that the change could not be made without supporting documentation….which of course, they had kept and engineers and insurance reports to say that the conversion had been correctly carried out. I eventually managed to get through on the phone and after some “discussion” spoke to a supervisor who confirmed they had made a mistake, found scanned copies of my previous correspondence and sent a new, corrected V5C. However, they had applied the old exhaust emissions limits, which was to my advantage.
My wife makes clothing and sells at craft fairs. She needed a bigger van, so she could travel to Christmas fairs, her busiest time of the year. We bought a used van at the end of November, from a dealer thirty miles away. It was converted with three individual, extra rear seats to carry passengers and had been fitted with an extra floor with a track to secure belts for a wheel chair. No structural mods were made because it had a simple, removable ramp fitted at the back to get the wheelchair in and out. It was ideal for her because she sometimes needs to carry family passengers. I went online to put vehicle “road” tax on it. The system wouldn’t allow me to do it and told me it had to be done at a post office. No joy!
To cut a long story short, after three visits to two different post offices I was party to a conference call at the post office after they couldn’t do it either, between the senior post master, the post office computer helpline supervisor, and the DVLA. DVLA blamed the post office’s computer system but the post office blamed DVLA. The van dealer got involved and tried to sort it, but he couldn’t, DVLA wouldn’t accept what he said.
I rang DVLA again. They told me because it had been classified as a disability vehicle it had free road tax. I explained that it was no longer owned by a disabled person and so needed to be taxed. They then wanted information on the structural mods and the company who had carried out the work, which I didn’t have details of. A supervisor eventually told me to send photos of inside, outside and underneath to show what work had been carried out so they could assess whether or not it could retain its free tax status….I had to remind them that I actually wanted to pay tax, to make it legal because we weren’t disabled, in accordance with their own rules, not to retain its free status! I sent photos off, signed for postage, with the application form and a cheque.
They told me that in the meantime, if the vehicle was driven on public roads it remained untaxed so we would be liable to prosecution.
The cheque was cashed within a couple of days, but the van still kept coming up as untaxed, right up until the middle of January.
My wife had to hire a van over the Christmas period so she could get her job done, while her own van sat unused on the driveway. Cost us quite a bit and knocked out a lot of her profit.
Seven weeks after the initial application was made, a new V5C arrived in the post. I checked online and confirmed the van was now taxed and legal. Relief all round until we discovered that the “bar stewards” had back taxed it to the day my wife had bought it!
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