Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency

Sarah Coombes Excerpts

Thursday 23rd April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sarah Coombes (West Bromwich) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade) for securing this important debate. Roads are the arteries of our nation, keeping us and our economy moving, and the rules governing our roads rely on being able to identify vehicles and their drivers, which is the responsibility of the DVLA. It really matters. It matters to His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs for road tax to pay for upkeep; it matters to those of us who want to walk, drive and cycle safely; and it matters to the police, who can use number plates to work out who is using our roads. When the rules of the road are not enforced—when people flout them with no punishment—it degrades trust.

I will highlight two elements of the DVLA systems that are failing: first, the regulation of number plate sales, and secondly, the rise of ghost vehicle owners due to there being no registered keeper. I will start with number plates, the little piece of plastic on the front of a vehicle, which most people hopefully never have to think too much about. Number plates are the quiet bedrock of how we enforce the rules of our roads. Number plates should tell us who owns a car, and they should be readable by cameras so that the police can use automatic number plate recognition software, which is essential for their work.

In many other countries, number plates are treated as what they are—passports for our roads—and are highly regulated. In France, for example, vehicles are allocated a plate for life, with no changes permitted, and in many other countries only one or a few companies can sell plates. The UK system looks absurd in comparison. To become a number plate supplier here, someone simply pays a £40 one-off fee to the DVLA. There are no background checks and no criminal checks. This has led to a situation where the UK has more than 34,000 suppliers registered as selling number plates with the DVLA. For context, that is four times the number of petrol stations in Britain.

If the DVLA had the ability to check that all those companies were doing the right thing—that they were asking for ownership documents and ID documents when they sold the number plate to someone, and only selling plates that were fully readable and not ghost plates—the situation would be fine, but the DVLA does not do that, and it will never be able to check so large a system.

I have no doubt that most people buying a number plate are doing so for innocent reasons, but it is crystal clear that many people are buying dodgy number plates to make themselves invisible to speed cameras, to avoid paying road charges and to commit serious crimes, and unscrupulous sellers are allowing that to happen. To give an example, in 2025 a young man was murdered in cold blood in Slough, and the police eventually worked out that the killer’s car was using a cloned plate. When the police found the car, it had no plates on, but it had a stash of different registration plates in the back. They found the person who sold the cloned plates, and he was fined £5,500 and removed from the DVLA register for five years, after which time he is perfectly allowed to start selling number plates all over again. There is a live rape case, which I will not go into any detail on, where a driver used a ghost number plate on his vehicle when he committed the alleged offence.

I have heard so many cases of drug dealers using ghost plates to go undetected by ANPR and fraudsters copying other people’s number plates. These dodgy companies sell cloned number plates without a second thought, and law-abiding drivers are left to pick up the pieces as they fight to prove that they are innocent of a crime or appeal against huge financial penalties.

Dodgy number plate sellers are a public scandal waiting to happen. They are the next chapter in the candy shops or dodgy vape shops story. Those businesses are really fronts for money laundering and criminality. Rochdale trading standards has been superb at exposing this. Its work has uncovered links between DVLA-accredited suppliers and individuals with histories of murder, firearms, drugs, robbery and violent assault—you couldn’t make it up. In one of its inspections, it found 20 number plates that had been sold with none of the legally required ID checks or proof of vehicle checks. Almost half of those plates were later linked by the police to serious and organised crime. Rochdale trading standards officers described finding DVLA-registered suppliers operating out of back bedrooms and garden sheds. One supplier was at 33 Smith Street. The next supplier was at 35 Smith Street. I hope I am painting a picture of the serious systemic failings in how the DVLA operates number plate sales in Britain.

With some estimates saying that up to one in 15 of all vehicles on UK roads has some kind of non-compliant plate, we can see the scale of the problem. Some of these suppliers are using ghost materials so routinely that even law-abiding members of the public may be inadvertently buying ghost plates. I urge anyone listening to this debate that if they need to buy a number plate, they should please ensure that the seller asks for their car ownership document and ID. If they do not, that person is buying from an illegal seller who is breaking the law.

Last year, the all-party parliamentary group for transport safety carried out an inquiry into registration plates and made 10 recommendations, all of which I believe the Government should implement. They include banning the use of 3D and 4D plates, introducing background checks on suppliers and restricting the number of licensed sellers. I would like to praise the Government for committing to action on this in the road safety strategy, and in particular I pay tribute to the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood), who has been absolutely great. However, can the Minister update us on when he hopes some of these system changes will be made to tighten up the number plate system? In particular, will he ask the DVLA what is going on with banning 3D and 4D plates, which are the vast majority of ghost plates, and will he update us on when the next Department for Transport roadside survey will take place, because the last one was in 2023?

I will now move on to the second topic that I am concerned about: vehicle registered keeper information. Even if a driver has a fully compliant number plate, it is still possible for them to cheat the rules and become a ghost on the roads in another way. All cars should have a registered keeper listed with the DLVA but, unfortunately, lax rules mean that many cars do not have, and their owners are therefore completely untraceable. Think about it: with hit and runs, excessive speeding and running red lights, even when a vehicle gets caught on camera doing any of those things, if the DVLA has no information about who owns the vehicle, there is no way to hold those people to account.

According to the DVLA, 7% of vehicles have no registered keeper, and it argues that the majority of them are in the motor trade, but I just do not think that is true, and I have a personal anecdote to explain why. Last summer, I was out with the roads policing team in West Brom, and the ANPR monitor in the police car kept dinging every 30 seconds. I asked the officer, “What is setting off the ANPR?” and the officer said, “Those are cars with no registered keeper.”

Today, The Guardian has covered a shocking freedom of information request made by the British Parking Association to the DVLA. When a car has no registered keeper or it has an outdated or incorrect keeper address, the DVLA sometimes registers the vehicle to its own address. The DVLA has admitted in answer to this FOI request that, at the latest count, 18,260 vehicles are currently registered to its own office in Swansea.

The rise of these ghost owners undermines our ability to enforce the rules of our roads, and it is not just a safety risk. I spoke to the Motor Insurers’ Bureau about the rise in the number of collisions when one party cannot be traced because the vehicle has no registered keeper, the number plate is fake or a ghost plate, or the driver raced away. We all pay a premium on our insurance to cover the costs when uninsured or untraceable drivers are involved in a collision, and that adds up to £50 on the insurance premiums of all of us every year.

There is also a big cost, or rather a big loss, to the public sector through this issue. I feel the pain as much as anyone does when I get slapped with a parking ticket when I think I have done the right thing, or I get a fine for driving down the wrong road. However, some people are flouting the rules constantly, and they are getting away with it by having a car with no registered keeper, or registering with a NIP—notice of impending prosecution—farm so their fine gets sent to a totally anonymous post office box and the fine does not get passed on.

Since I started doing this work, I have realised how much of an issue unpaid fines are. In Hackney, for example, a single individual owes the council £250,000. I recently asked my council, Sandwell, how much it was owed, and I was shocked to discover that almost one third of penalty charge notices had gone unpaid since last April, equating to £1.2 million. Can hon. Members imagine what that money could have been spent on?

I will finish because I know other Members want to speak. A great many good people work in the DVLA, as the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole mentioned, and I know that because I have spoken to lots of them. What is failing here is the system, including how we sell the very plates that identify all our vehicles, and how we regulate and monitor who actually owns the cars on our roads. I know the DVLA has a lot on, but this is a very serious problem, and there is huge opportunity to grasp here, to fix the system for the future.

[Rebecca Smith (South West Devon) (Con)]

The hon. Member is making an excellent speech, which has reminded me of a conversation I recently had in my constituency. Drivers in the area of Hooe and Plymstock are showing really antisocial behaviour, and one of the police officers I was with mentioned this fact. We were not even talking about how cars are registered to the DVLA, but does she not find extraordinary the number that are registered to Mickey Mouse?

[Sarah Coombes]

That is absolutely true. Vehicles are registered to Mickey Mouse, or to big organisations’ addresses. There are simply no checks whatsoever on whom people register vehicles to, which means they are doing really dangerous and really antisocial things, and getting away with it.

The Labour Party manifesto committed us to taking back our streets, and reforming the DVLA will help us tackle the racers, fraudsters, drug dealers and dodgy number plate sellers who are making our constituents’ lives a misery. This situation has gone on for too long. Now that the Government are committed to action on this, I hope we can finally catch the ghost plates and the ghost owners on our roads, and make all our roads safer for us all.