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Registration and re-registration within the EU
The term ‘British Motorist’ will of
course apply to foreign nationals as well as those born
and grown up here. Just swap British
fior the name of your town.
Whether you are a just-retired postie considering
relocating to France, or whether you are a Spaniard who
is becoming settled and would now like to bring your
pride and joy to over here; you will not find the
process easy. Your old local DVLA office is long since
closed down. Its workers having been laid-off and the
work shipped in to the Swansea call centre. The only
help you will get from the DVLA will be on the phone and
through stacks of pamphlets they send out.
At VRS we provide comprehensive packages for UK DVLA
registration of vehicles imported or driven and
relocated here. We also provide conformity documentation
and advice for people going the other way, who want to
take their cars and bikes with them. Whichever the
direction, you will need your vehicle registration
document, so DON’T send it back or destroy it. You will
also need EC type approval evidence or documentation. In
the UK, this is presently waived for vehicles over 10
years old. But in the rest of Europe it isn’t. This is
something you must consider, as it will cost several
thousands of Euros if you arrive in Spain [for example] needing local
testing in the absence of an EC COC. For foreign
nationals and returning British expats, you also have to
notify the hmrc of UK Vehicle Arrival, and don’t delay
as they can fine you £5 per day after a 14 day grace
period.
Aside from Brexit…
European road regulations and compliance never
harmonised. We are asked all the time, why is my French
MOT test pass no good in the UK? People who are well
travelled are genuinely surprised by this. We aren’t.
Even though we have some countries left-hand traffic and
some right-hand traffic, vehicle technical-mechanical
compliance is EU-wide. But the authorities, such as the
UK DVLA, in each member state have their own agendas,
their own prejudices in what are quite often
personalised procedures, and – of course, their own
local lobbying groups. By this we mean, if French and
Spanish MOT test passes were acceptable in the UK (and
people say they are stricter than the UK version)
wouldn’t this affect the careers and prospects of UK MOT
testers? Probably it would. As things stand, if a French
car rolls up in your town with a new French MOT, as part
of the UK registration process a local garage may pick
up the job of, wait for it, MOT test, changing of
headlights (stickers not allowed), addition of an
off-side rear fog light, and - usually - the changing of speedometer
to MPH, not to mention any niggly MOT failure repairs.
Is the weekend road trip to Paris gone?
With the introduction last year of the French ‘Crit-Air’
certificate, the regular female or male Sunday Driver
fancying a spontaneous trip to Paris may be in trouble.
For a start, vehicles of a certain age are banned from
the city. Every other vehicle has to be registered on
the Crit-Air scheme and allocated an emissions class.
This can be difficult as your log book (V5C) may in many
or even most cases not contain key pieces of information
to obtain the certificate. We provide a service where we
can obtain same-day certification as we can access all
the information needed by the French authorities that
many drivers simply cannot or don’t want to locate.
Driving through a large portion of the whole of France
requires a Crit-Air sticker in the windscreen. Failure
to do so risks a serious fine.
Off to Brussels for the Christmas market? Strongly
recommended by our office, given the let-down of the
past dozen annual pseudo-German markets here in
Bristol.
Well you will need to know if your vehicle complies with
the Belgian LEZ. This can be done if you can find the
right Belgian government web site and, again, can manage
to come up with all the information they need. We do
provide a comprehensive service and can complete the
compliance test for drivers, giving them the facts and
status information they need same-day.
It doesn’t end here, with these two countries. Across
the whole of the EU, member states are now rolling out
their own LEZ schemes. Why could there not be one LEZ
scheme for the whole of the EU is the question many will
ask. The cynical would say because it is mainly about
local traffic circulation control and the fines. It
isn’t really about clean air. Others may say what is the
difference between this and having to navigate an LEZ in
London and an LEZ in Manchester. Well, only that in the
EU they seem to assume a lot of things, like you have an
ID card, you know your car’s EC type approval number,
your log book states the car’s EC emissions class. Plus,
there is the language and translation barrier and the
lack of human help in person or on the phone. Not to
mention the fact that you may have paid a lot to get to,
say, Austria, in your motorhome. We’ve got lots of
horror stories!
Whichever way you look at it, you could be very busy
online, if work or pleasure takes you around the EU
regularly. Because even after you have gathered up all
these discs, and confirmed you have met LEZ criteria,
and displayed everything you are supposed to for the
given trip, you will find that different places apply
different rules at different times. The French system is
the worst for this, as they intend to dictate daily –
which cars displaying which windscreen sticker number
can go where and at what time.
…When you think about it, it doesn’t matter that we are
leaving or even if we aren’t leaving the EU. For the UK
motorist, each destination country has always had to be viewed as a
separate country with separate traffic and vehicle
licensing rules. Perhaps if the whole of the EU had one
LEZ windscreen sticker system and an easy
re-registration procedure within the EU, we would have
felt
less like leaving. It is indeed a tangled mess on the
vehicular side of things. The only thing all are united
about is trying to stop individual people importing
vehicles from outside the EU. The DVLA make it very
tough to do so and that is another story. But you can
always call us for free advice and a range of
registration help services.
By Data Management Team of VRS.
©
EUROCERT LIMITED 2019
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