Legal requirment of permit display ?

On Monday, 28 January 2013 14:44:16 UTC, Dave West wrote:>

It's going to depend more on what your local Gestapo division expects you to do. Can't you just use a tax disc holder?

IANAL but isn't it in the T&Cs you should have received with it ? Also, ISTR there is a definition somewhere (under Construction and Use) which lists exactly what *is* allowed in a windscreen. Tax Disc being one..

Did it co9me with a set of rules? Uusally the rules say that it must be clearly displayed.

do. Can't you just use a tax disc holder?

I used to use a tax disc holder with a quickly releasable magnetic back for pay and display tickets. Must be something with what the human brain expects to see but the parking attendants were forever missing the valid tickets, they just didn't notice a rectangle inside a circle. It was actually quite good fun to watch them from where I was working and take a picture with their digital camera and just after they had written the penalty parking notice saunter out and pointing at the valid ticket in the holder remark "you did get this in focus didn't you?"

G.Harman

Ours are round and fit a licence holder.

Almost certainly there will be something, either on it or that came with it, that defines what constitutes displaying it properly.

The C&U Regs only make it an offence to drive a vehicle in which the glass is maintained in such a condition that the vision of the driver is impaired. However, the vehicle will fail an MOT if stickers encroach more than 10mm upon zone A (a vertical part of the swept area 290mm wide centred on the steering wheel) or 40mm upon zone B (the rest of the swept area). The position of the tax disk is covered in The Road Vehicles (Registration and Licensing) Regulations 2002, which require that it is affixed on or adjacent to the nearside of the windscreen.

Colin Bignell

Yes. Dead easy. OP should get a life.

Tax disc is an anacronism IMO. Completely unnessary these days with mobile access to central DVLA. Should be done away with ASAP.

Are you paying the bill to install ANPR on every plod car, and increase the number of plod on the beat, and the number of traffic wardens etc to check each individual car, or are you just talking out of your arse again? Surely your idea is so much cheaper than having a very low cost, visible means of verifying whether a car has road tax or not in 2 seconds flat! I'm stunned no one else has thought of it.

The visible means you mention has effectively no safeguards to prevent duplication or alteration, making it trivially easy to bypass the system. In other words, in a 2 second check you still have no reliable idea if the car is taxed.

The plod have radios. Trouble is without a visible tax disc they would be radioing in for every car on the road.

Guy I work with said he was stopped at roundabout by foot patrol and done on the spot for failing to display. They radioed in and got a check that he had tax so didn't wrongly do him for no tax but the correct offense of failing to display.

20+ years ago the next door neighbor was done the same way on the 1st of a month, the "new" 14 days before tax disc was in the glovebox.

At least your argument with the increased number of traffic wardens falls flat. Who is checking the tax discs nowadays if not the traffic wardens? Other countries do without Tax disc obscuring the windscreen.

And about the 2 seconds: These days with excellent printers/scanners, the proper verification of a Tax disc takes more than 2 seconds scrutiny.

In message , Peter Hill writes

I got caught for the same offence many years ago, by a sharp-eyed cop who saw my out of date disc in his mirror when I stopped behind him at a road junction. I offered to show him the new disc I'd forgotten to fit if he followed me home, but he declined.

I received a summons for failing to display, and decided to appear in the magistrates court and explain my forgetfulness. I was given an absolute discharge by the rather sweet lady chairman.

Which is a lot quicker than entering a registration number

Quite a lot make you buy a number plate. Of course you could put the disc where doesn't obscure your vision, the bottom left corner's traditional

So you leave ANPR & plod to catch them with a bigger fine.

In the UK most of the local ones are employed by a contractor to enforce parking restrictions - it's been privatized. The local council isn't concerned with VED. And they would be charged extra if the contractor took on these duties.

Hence the motor insurance database , people were running thier own insurance documents up and without conntacting insurance companies the plod had no way of checking the legitamacy

[....]

Didn't Delboy use a round piece of paper with: "The cheque is in the post", or somthing...?

My Residents' Parking Permit (LB Camden) is a card with a barcode. The council's parking warden (not traffic warden) checks it with a scanner, there is nothing else on the card so without a scanner it cannot be checked. I also have a German environmental zone sticker, the size and shape of a tax disk, but it is self adhesive and can't be removed without obliterating the printing. Likewise the Swiss motorway tax sticker.

So, if disks in a window are useful they need to self destruct on removal, and ideally carry a machine readable code to enable an online check.

Why would you need ANPR? Police cars carry up to four semi-automatic eyeballs.