So amidst my speeding infractions, from 1st March to 19th April my car has been untaxed. I have therefore been operating an illegal vehicle for this time and I only noticed by chance that it was majorly out of date when at some petrol station in Gunnersbury. So this has included driving to work from Amersham and parking on street in Ealing, travelling to my parents house several times, going to Bicester, Windsor, Slough and many other places and included picking my parents up from the airport.I hadn’t taxed my car because, well, I forgot basically as the papers got filed away in (the ironically titled) ‘Nick’s box of important documents’ while I was packing stuff up at Amersham and were deposited in a cupboard in my new place whilst many more (supposedly) pressing issues were resolved.
So I have had to go through the irritating process of sorting out a retrospective tax disc which apparently involves me writing a grovelling letter to the DVLA requesting that they be nice to me and me offering to pay my ‘tax arrears.’ I have had to make three visits to the post office and endure their predictably poor and antiquated systems and being told because its retrospective I needed something called a log book which was a bugger to find in the aforementioned ‘Nick’s box of important documents’ (and turns out to be neither bookish in nature nor a log of anything, multicoloured confusing form perhaps describing its function better). I finally managed to get my tax disc today to get me road legal again but still have to write my grovelling letter to the DVLA to clear my name.
However, that I haven’t gotten enforced for all of this makes me wonder quite how much I could have got away with and whether I should bother with a grovelling letter to the DVLA at all.
Experience of dealing with people who I have been enforcing planning stuff against generally have some excuse (occasionally quite comical and often pretty weak) as to why they flouted planning regulations and for the majority of the time they abjectly fail to appreciate that they have done anything wrong because they had some ‘really good reason’ to justify it.
Well, not me in this case. I didn’t pay my car tax which was very naughty and I have no excuse other than being busy and forgetting about it which is a crap excuse. So there. It would be nice if I could sort it out more easily though and not have to jump through multiple procedural hoops to sort it out. Especially as I would imagine that a retrospective tax disc is not an uncommon phenomenon. Oh, and yeah, I could have done without disapproving looks from jobsworth post office workers too.
5 comments:
I think you should grovel to the DVLA. Excuses dont wash with people like this, unless its something like "I was in a coma for the period when I didnt pay my tax". You would then have to prove you were in a coma obviously. Just get it out of the way and then write the date you need to renew it in your diary!
Personally I would say dont bother contacting them unless they contact you!! You have your tax disc, you dont have a court summons or any fine or anything, they never even bothered contacting you to say it had expired, so i would suggest let sleeping dogs lie. If they get in touch with you then think about sending the grovelling letter!!!
see now i have thought both these things and haven't come to a decision. however they may have tried to contact me but at my old address!
Yes but, then you can claim you never received the letter and if you had already changed your address with them, you can say its their own fault for not updating their system.
ah, if only if it was that easy... apparetnly it is an offence to not tell them that i moved in the first instance, setting aside my subsequent infractions!
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