New stealth tax - Buying/Selling a car

This is sneaky.

The car tax rules are changing in October. After that, you'll no longer have to display the paper disc in the window. Fair enough, we're in the electronic age now. But...

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/vehicle-tax-changes

Watch out. If you sell your car, the tax wont transfer with the car like it currently does. It will be just like you've cashed in your tax disc. Except you wont have a choice, it just happens automatically.

So, if you sell your car on the 2nd of the month, you'll get a refund for every remaining complete month, which would not include the month you sold it in. The new owner will have to buy tax for that month, so in effect the government gets that month's tax twice, once from you and once from the new owner.

So in effect, this is a tax on private used car sales.

 

I have always found that if you trade in a car at a dealership they cash the tax disc in anyway, so I have always taken the disc out before handing the car over

 

How is this going to work for private sales, last car I sold purchaser drove off with it licensed , there must be some grace period to allow you to drive it home and then either get a tax disc online or visit post office pronto.
If a system works why do we need some jobsworth tinkering with process to make sure it doen't.
Agree with Clueless someone reckons this will be a nice little earner.

 

It hardly seems worth spending any time worrying about it to me. If you change your car every 4 years and the tax is £150 p.a./£12.50 per month, the average tax 'lost' would be £6.25 (half a month) which is only £3.13 when divided between seller and buyer, so only adding 1.5p/week in extra 'tax' to your vehicle running costs if just buying or just selling, or 3p/week if both buying and selling.

 

But there's a principle at stake. If you filled up your tank at the petrol station then went to pay, and the man said, 'today, we're charging you twice for the VAT and fuel duty, just because the government thought you wouldn't notice', you'd be pretty outraged.

 

The tax on the car I have just traded in was £480 per annum, so I lost about half a month, £20 or so, better my pocket than the governments.

 

As we generally buy new (with road tax) and run the cars into the ground until they're part exchanged or scrapped, I don't see how this change will affect us in any way whatsoever.

But what I am concerned about is how this no disk system will enable untaxed, uninsured, no MOT vehicles to drive around undetected unless caught by ANPR. The current system enables uninsured drivers to buy vehicles with 11 months tax and drive them around nearly a year without it being obvious (and often they don't even register themselves as the new owner).

So I'm all for tax disks being cancelled when vehicles are sold as new owners will not be able to remain taxed despite having no insurance. With a sufficient increase in ANPR cameras (which will be essential if there's no longer going to be a visible disk in vehicles) the savings from a reduction in uninsured drivers should outweigh the loss of half a month's tax every 3 to 10 years for those who buy vehicles sold by way of private sales.


P.S. Saw the police in action at a local edge of town McDonalds (always a haunt of low life) last weekend catching one uninsured driver after another, with a queue of poster emblazoned vehicles lined up waiting to be towed away to the pound, one up on each tow truck and another pulled behind it.

 

It will be no different to how it is now. The tax disc is finished for two reasons as I see it. 1) A printer cable of making a convincing forgery can now be bought for as little as £30 and 2) There aren't enough coppers to go round checking tax discs anyway.

Recent changes in the law have made it harder for people to be naughty in this respect. For example, it is now an offence to have a car that is not either taxed or SORN, you can't tax a vehicle without valid insurance, and as has been the case for a long time, you can't tax a car without a valid MOT.

This just leaves the people you describe that buy a car with 11 months tax but then drive around with no insurance and no MOT. Possibly even no license. The coppers have never been able to check license, insurance or MOT just based on a visual check, so no change there, and for reason 1 above, they've not for a long time now been able to reliably check the tax based on a visual either.

One last point on the MOT. I'm afraid it means very little beyond the legal requirements to have one. There are many, many death traps out there that would still pass an MOT. The MOT test involves checking the lights work, checking that the tyres aren't bald, checking that the brakes and suspension work, a bit, and checking that nothing is obviously hanging off. The MOT test will not look at things like, a shock absorber that is so worn and sluggish to react that the wheel it supports just bounces along the road, the camber is so far warped that only about an inch at the edge of the tyre is actually holding any weight, the fuel injector seals are so worn that they are dribbling fuel all over the hot engine block, the brake pads are down to bare metal so that although the car can brake fine when cold, the whole thing will quickly heat up and seize in an emergency stop, rendering the ABS completely useless, the brake lines are full of water instead of brake fluid so after a period of heavy braking the brakes become spongy and might even fail, the ignition components are so corroded that they could (and probably will) fail at the most inappropriate time and without warning, causing sudden and total loss of power - not a good thing if your in lane 3 of a motorway, overtaking, at night (happened to me in a previous car before I found the offending component). I could go on and on

 

But all they needed to do was make a simple online check back at their station based upon what they'd spotted out on patrol. An that's when you saw massive 'Do not move this vehicle - no Insurance/MOT/Do not move this vehicle all over it.