More ELV questions and answers

Following on from the previous blogs we asked more questions of the Department for Business, Innovations and Skills. Our questions, and their responses are below:

Question: From the data given, we have 1 million vehicles de-registered during 2009 where certificate of destruction or notification of destruction has not been issued. I would be surprised if 1 million vehicles have had a cherished transfer or been exported, so what has happened to these vehicles, and if they have been scrapped why have they not gone through the ELV process as demanded by the EU End of Life Vehicle Regulations, the EU Waste Directive or even by Environment Agency guidelines?

Answer: First, the CoD requirements only apply to those vehicles stipulated under the ELV Directive (cars and light goods to 3.5 tonnes). Anything above this is not subject to CoD requirements. The Home Office were considering introducing a mandatory NoD requirement for vehicles over 3.5 tonnes, but there is no guarantee that this will proceed. Around 260,000 used vehicles are permanently exported annually. BIS, through its responsibility to collect information on ELV recycling and recovery performance is aware that there are vehicles passing through ATFs where a CoD has not been raised. In the 2008 report to the European Commission, the UK reported on a total of over 1,259,000 vehicles of which a CoD or other related notification to DVLA had not been raised on some 130,000 vehicles.


Question: What is DVLA policy when a vehicle owner attempts to scrap their vehicle? Do they accept the notification of scrapping from the owner (probably through the tick box on the V5), or do they refuse and insist on a Certificate of Destruction being issued?

Answer: We understand that DVLA does update the vehicle database where the tick box on the V5 is returned. However, in this case it does not deregister the vehicles from the database. You may be aware that the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Transport has recently announced the introduction of a new vehicle registration document. The new document will not include the scrapping tick-box and will be available for newly registered vehicles from the middle of next month and for all vehicles from July 2011.


Question: Is it possible to obtain full details on the numbers of vehicle notified as scrapped through the tickbox on the V5 and by personally scrapped de-registrations?

Answer: We will check with DVLA and get back to you separately on this. One complication is that there can be overlap between CoDs and vehicles notified as scrapped through the V5 tick-box.