Fake 'ghost' number plates that can't be seen by cameras face fresh crackdown
Fake plates allow criminals to disguise who’s driving an offending vehicle.
The government has launched a crackdown on fine-dodgers and criminal gangs using illegal number plates to commit fraud and other serious offences, including drug trafficking.
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A new police database is being established to help tackle the prevalence of so-called ‘ghost plates’, where a vehicle’s registration is in a font which cannot be read by speed cameras, as well as cloned and missing plates.
Fake plates allow criminals to disguise who’s driving an offending vehicle, which police warn encourages dangerous driving, makes it harder to track stolen vehicles, and often results in unsuspecting motorists being lumbered with big fines for offences they did not commit.
Roads Minister Justin Madders said the new National Roads Policing Coordination Centre will help to reduce the number of illegal number plates in operation across England by sharing data and utilising new technology.
This includes arming officers with new specialised goggles that can detect number plates where criminals have tried to make them unreadable by cameras.
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“The term ‘ghost plates’ covers a whole range of illegal activity,” Mr Madders explained. “You've got the people who will just simply ignore congestion charges, parking charges and, of course, for the individual who then gets the fine, that's a real issue for them.
“There have been some high-profile examples of people getting lots of fines for ghost plates and cloned plates, and what we would need to do is really tackle this on a coordinated national basis.”
In June, Londoner Sandra Yarwood returned from a five-day holiday abroad to find she had received two Penalty Charge Notices (PCNs) while she was away.
Over the next two weeks, dozens more charges were posted to her, leaving her on the hook for around £2,500.
“I ended up with 32 in total,” Sandra told LBC.
“It was horrible. I really did start to have nightmares that the bailiffs were going to turn up.
“It's horrendous because you feel victimised. You feel like you've been attacked by a system that hasn't caught up with the sophistication of criminals; some of the councils don’t seem to be aware that cloning is a thing.”
Sandra’s issues extended beyond the financial stress.
She had received PCNs from seven London councils and faced an avalanche of admin in seeking to prove she was not liable for the fines.
“For each PCN you have to upload all the information, fill in the form, and it's all fine if the systems are working, but quite often the platforms or the websites don't work.
“You just feel like you're being sucked into a vortex of bureaucracy that's never going to let you go.
“I must have spent about 32 hours on it… an absolute waste of my time.”
As well as creating headaches for law-abiding motorists, the ghost plates are often used to facilitate some of the most serious crimes.
“We're really focused on connected offending, where you have people who are drink- or drug-drivers but actually there's connections through to violence against women and girls, there's connections through to other types of offending,” Superintendent Matt Willmot told LBC.
Supt Wilmot, a senior officer at the new National Roads Policing Coordination Centre, added: “What might start out as a very simplistic sort of roads policing focus into a non-compliant vehicle often opens huge investigative avenues into far more serious offending.
“I would always pose the question, why is it that somebody doesn't want their vehicle or themselves to be identified as the driver of that vehicle? What is the criminality they're trying to hide? Is it serious criminality? Is it drugs offending? Is it that the vehicles are stolen? Is it that it's plant machinery that's been stolen?
“The question is always going to be: why has somebody deliberately taken steps to hide the identity of that vehicle?”
Alongside the introduction of the National Roads Policing Coordination Centre, the DVLA and DVSA have been working with police to help identify businesses involved in the supply of illegal plates.
This includes a requirement for garages performing MOTs to take a photo of plates during tests to help them identify fraudulent plates.
In recent years, there have been around 10,000 reports of fraudulent plates annually.
Drivers using incorrect number plates can be fined up to £1,000.