Musicman

they probably got rather worried after they heard the rumours about them being prone to grenading :-P

Motion seconded :) Have fun!

A hibernating Bumble Bee being woken up untimely by the warmth? [i'd be pissed off too]

Have you elected a Pope recently? :) [ I swear that's the last time I'll use that joke ]

[ cough ] and it's going to happen more and more often as more fixed ANPR cameras are deployed. Add to that the fact that even the DVLA admit that up to a third of their records are inaccurate and it's a recipe for some unlucky people being stopped every five minutes. Attempting to resolve this has a knock on effect with the Insurance companies. Norwich Union recently used the argument that having "Driving Other Cars" provision on some policies makes it harder for the police to identify uninsured drivers as part of their reasoning to remove that facility from their Fully Comprehensive policies. Other insurers have said that they may follow suit. We may yet end up in a situation where you're only allowed to drive a car if you're a previously named driver for that vehicle.

According to the DVLA web site, they're legal http://www.dvla.gov.uk/faq/faq_number_plates.htm#24 Unless they mean literally 3D - i.e. raised characters, as in a pressed metal plate or early 1970s number plates?

I reckon that belongs to a fellow who goes by the name of Arkoo who's a member of that forum. http://www.scirocco.pl/module.php?op=galery&cmd=65 8) photo

^^^ what he said. On the point of legibility, check these out, posted by someone on No-Rice. German British To my eye, the German one is far more legible. The British plate is a crime against typography. WTF is going on with the kerning between the N and the 8?

How about a Braille? :)

I imagine there has been a quiet re-definition of the word 'legible' to mean 'readable by our computer system'.

Just in case anyone had doubts that this was real DVLA Web Site

Is there a right turn filter? I'm wondering if that was still on red, which might explain it.

I suspect there's a little confusion going on. http://www.speedcamerasuk.com/TrafficLight.htm Some red light cameras are additionally equipped with speed measurement equipment, but it's used to see if you were exceeding the speed limit while crossing the junction in addition to running the red light. Strictly speaking, amber is a stop signal, unless it would be unsafe to do so, but AFAIK, the cameras will only activate if you are actually crossing the line on a red light.

And I believe you have additional rights to see it under Data Protection Act.

How on earth can they work that out? Do they have stopping distance tables for every make/model of car/whether ABS was an option or not, together with an instant weigh-bridge under the road surface to check how much load you were carrying at the time and real-time recording of the weather? Stopping from 30 mph in a Jaguar Mk 2 with four passengers on a cold,wet day is rather different than doing the same in a lightly loaded Smart Car in the dry. Not to mention that Stone Mastic Ashphalt used by many road authorities to reduce tyre noise may actually increase stopping distances by up to 30% for the first 12 months after it's been laid... :?

A sample of what's to come from the DVLA, courtesy of Paul from Dubmeister How your show plates will look in the future:

It's so unscrupulous parking companies can't send off for your address to the DVLA and land a £170 bill on your doormat :)

I imagine it wasn't just the local scumbags :D I don't think I'd disagree with just about anything you've said in your previous post, White2505. In some ways, I think I'd probably be in favour of mandatory re-testing of drivers on a regular basis, say every seven or ten years, to address many of the things you've mentioned. Unfortunately, none of that is the point at issue. Forgive me if I've made the wrong assumption, but your description of yourself as a 'response officer' and your description of your daily work leads me to conclude that you're not part of one of the new ANPR intercept teams and thus don't operate under the same guidance that they do. If you are, it may be that Devon are working in a slightly different manner to that outlined by the Association of Chief Police Officers. To my mind, there are three issues at stake: 1. Currently, it is perfectly legal to have a set of non-regulation number plates for use off the public highway. From the information posted by Joy at Dubmeister, it seems that particular freedom, enjoyed by many of the users of this forum, is under threat. I appreciate this is not quite your domain of law enforcement, but rather a matter for legislators and the DVLA. 2. As you have made clear in your own post, regular officers such as yourself are currently able to exercise their discretion when dealing with members of the public who may have committed minor offences relating to the format of their number plates. If my reading of the ACPO strategy document is correct, ANPR intercept teams now present in every force in the country are discouraged from exercising that discretion. Why? It is necessary for ANPR to demonstrate revenue-returns in excess of the levels found during the Laser 1 and Laser 2 trials, so that the Police may receive the continued support of the Home Office for ANPR deployment. Furthermore, retention of 98% of the income from FPNs resulting from ANPR intercepts will provide a useful revenue stream for other police work (Section 2.3, Para 14 of the ACPO ANPR Strategy 2005/8 ). The targets set out are straightforward: "at least 310 FPNs per full-time intercept officer per year" with a 50% recovery rate vs the face value of those Notices. The objective is clear, to maximise revenue, in the short term at the very least: Since it is a stated objective of ACPO to ensure that “Police Forces to undertake ANPR activity as an integral part of mainstream policing activity, ultimately to be funded from core capital and revenue,” it is likely that this technology will impact on your own role in the short or medium term. 3. There are wider issues surrounding the civil liberties implications of widely deployed ANPR, supplemented by Electronic Vehicle Identification, which both ACPO and my own city government, the Greater London Authority, seem keen to promote. It is not impossible to imagine that, with the suggested retention of vehicle movement data for up to five years, compounded the exchange or sale of that same information to commercial organisations, the opportunities for abuse are many and various. These concerns need to be addressed. I should perhaps add that I have only respect for the Traffic Police from the Hampshire Constabulary who stop regularly at No-Rice meets. They do get the plush Volvos, I'll admit :) but they're courteous, willing to engage in conversation and often quite enthusiastic about the VWs that turn up at Fleet. If only Guildford police had been that way, but they had a very different perspective on several hundred Volkswagens descending on a car park... I have nothing against most police officers, but I do reserve the right to question some of the policies that their superiors and political masters are pursuing.

Don't get me started on the Inland Revenue... I got stuck out of the blue with a demand for nearly £11,000 a couple of years ago, despite my protests that I should owe them no more than £4,000 after I'd ceased being self-employed. It got as far as the point where they were going to take me to court with all sorts of threats before I was forced to pay up (racking up interest payments on £11K in the meantime). My finances were not a pretty sight at the end of 2003 as a result. Lo and behold I found myself £7650 in credit when the annual statement dropped through my letterbox last December, without so much as a by-your-leave. Even then they somehow managed to lose £500 in the repayment that was supposed to go to National Insurance (had to pay them separately in the end) and I didn't get that back until the end of this summer. :x (sorry, went a bit off-topic there :oops:)

But you are, that's why they can issue a £60 Fixed Penalty Notice. :? You'll get pulled by a copper whose job it is to go after ANPR violators. His motivation will be that revenue gained from your FPN is hypothecated income for the local Police Force, er 'Service'. Even if you have regular plates in the boot, it's too late. From the ACPO document again [ their emphasis, not mine ] The Home Office Study evaluating ANPR showed that there was a (disappointing) return on investment of around 10%. It's up to the Police to show they can do better than that if they're going to keep using the system and develop it.

Indeed. That's a fundamental problem with the logic of the proposition. Unless, of course, either - the ANPR cameras are quite capable of reading 'foreign' plates and it's just an opportunity to enforce the rules that already exist, coincidentally improving their performance figures for FPNs. - the ANPR cameras can't reliably read non-standard plates, but these rejects are sent for human intervention to determine what the number is. If they can eliminate unreadable British plates from the roads, then the manpower required for this task may be substantially reduced and they can be confident that an unreadable plate is either foreign or dodgy in some way. I spent my time on the train to work this morning leafing through the Association of Chief Police Officers' strategy document published earlier this year: ANPR Strategy for the Police Servoce [sic] - 2005/2008 - "Denying Criminals the Use of the Roads". It's enlightening reading. Five years? :shock: Here's where they say they want to get vehicles electronically tagged: More detail on this is given in section 22 It also sets out their intention "to create a comprehensive ANPR Camera and Reader infrastructure across the country, to stop displacement of crime from area to area and to allow a comprehensive picture of vehicle movements to be captured". They've realised with experience of using CCTV and Gatsos that putting cameras in just moves the problem elsewhere, so the solution is for it to be everywhere. There will be no escape from their watchful eye. Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon in a modern form. This will involve the use of CCTV/ANPR cameras owned by 'agencies' such as Local Authorities and "Commercial and retail sites (especially garage forecourts)". Of course, the garages and supermarkets will get something in return "Ultimately all agencies will feed their ANPR read data into the NADC and be able to extract all other agencies data in return." It's a data swap between various public bodies and the supermarkets, petrol stations, parking companies, etc. For a feel for how this may operate in practice, check out this article in The Daily Mail (not my usual reading, but it's worth a look). Of course, following the model established by Speed (sorry 'Safety') Camera Partnerships, there will be "Proactive Marketing" of ANPR [section 28]: [emphasis added] They've already made much publicity of the fact that they apparently tracked the car involved in the Bradford shooting all the way to London using ANPR. More feel-good stories and sloganeering about "Denying Criminals the Use of the Roads" coming to a screen near you soon :roll:

It means that the assembled Cardinals of the Catholic Church have been unable to elect a new Pope yet :D

My 2p: it's all part of a longer term strategy. - It's in both the DVLA and Police interest for ANPR systems to operate effectively. Custom plates break it and they will stop you using them. - Expect many more stories of this kind in the future: Number plate theft 'on the rise' as criminals take to stealing plates because the ones they have for stolen cars, etc. will be detected much more quickly. A parallel is how chip and pin has already started to move card fraud into the online arena. - The DVLA/Police/DoT will then move for the introduction of legislation to mandate 'tamper proof' and RFID (radio) tags that can be read electronically. It may be that these are required to be mounted separately from the number plate itself to allow cross-checking of ANPR cameras and electronic sensors to prevent the use of forged/stolen plates. Anyone whose plate is unreadable by ANPR cameras, or there is a mis-match between the ANPR camera's reading of the plate and the RFID tag will then become a high-priority target for intercept teams. 'Show plates' provide a loophole by providing an excuse (as they see it) for real number plates to be removed from the car. Expect them to be limited in use to the motoring trade under special licence. The GLA has already begun trials of RFID for London Congestion Charge zone with an eye to introduction in 2008/9 and UK Gov announced it would be conducting its own trials in October

The thing is, with the increased prevalence of ANPR cameras, it'll be easier to spot those plates which are illegible to them and they're more likely come after you. Every force in the country has dedicated ANPR intercept teams since October and I believe they have targets to meet, so they're less likely to give you the benefit of the doubt than you might get otherwise. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/4431416.stm

you knew it was coming :? http://www.clubgti.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=93771 Additional info from Retro Rides