Registration and re-registration within the EU

The term ‘British Motorist’ will of course apply to foreign nationals as well as those born and raised 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 needing local testing in the absence of an ‘EC COC’.

In the UK, 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 in the EU/UK alliance. 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 the changing of speedometer to MPH (primary), not to mention any niggly MOT failure repairs.

Is the weekend road trip to Paris gone?

With the introduction 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 – the NOx now. And then, 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 and find yourself in, say, Austria, in your motorhome, without the right documents or facts. That’s not the same as driving 180 miles up the M^ to a different LEZ. We hear 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 windscreen 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 to be viewed as a separate country with separate traffic and vehicle licensing rules. The Schengen open borders scheme doesn’t really matter! Perhaps if the whole of the EU had one LEZ windscreen sticker system and an easy re-registration procedure within the EU, we would feel less like leaving. It is indeed a tangled mess on the vehicular side of things. The only thing all nation states are united about is trying to stop grey imports – individual citizens 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.