Road Tax - 11 months for the price of 12!

JMLL

Hi
I bought a vehicle on the 31st march last year and bought 12 months tax on the day. I now have a reminder to renew at the end of February. I'm aware that road tax runs on a month by month basis - but I had to buy the car that day and therefore had to tax it that day too.
The bottom line is I'm getting 11 months and 12 hours of taxed driving for the price of 12 and the DVLA has double taxed the vehicle for the month of March.
This seems to me a swindle. I'm being penalised for buying the car on the last day of the month!
Are there grounds for a refund? Has anyone encountered this situation before? I can 't bear to pay more tax than I have to!

foxy-stoat

JMLL wrote: »

I bought a vehicle on the 31st march last year and bought 12 months tax on the day.

Are there grounds for a refund? Has anyone encountered this situation before? I can 't bear to pay more tax than I have to!

Buying VED on 31st March was your first mistake - thinking you can get a refund is your second. You could of bought it on 1st April and you wouldnt of gone to prison.

This has been the way for a long time so nothing new here.

JMLL

Thanks Foxy - but are you suggesting that I should have driven away the vehicle without taxing it? ie breaking the law?

foxy-stoat

JMLL wrote: »

Thanks Foxy - but are you suggesting that I should have driven away the vehicle without taxing it? ie breaking the law?

If it was me then I would of driven it away and tax it the next day (or bought it the next day) - assuming it was local or a private sale where the owner already paid the VED for that month and it was not SORN.

If it 100% had to pay the VED on 31st March I would of known that I would of lost 30 days worth of VED.

Tell me you have NEVER EVER driven 1 mph over the speed limit - then talk about breaking laws.

JMLL

You might have known - but I didn't - first car since the tax used to come with the car. The website says you must buy tax before you drive away and that you're buying 12 months and doesn't say anything about a backdated start date. In my view this is misrepresentation.

If the only options are to drive away without tax or to tax the vehicle twice - not a great system is it!?
Think I'm just venting at this stage - but I am going to complain and see where it goes.

AdrianC

How much VED are we talking about for this one month...?

VED changed to be non-transferable on keeper change when the tax disc was discontinued in 2014.

You bought the tax in January, because you had the car on the road in January, so you've paid VED for January. I'm not sure how this is "back-dated".

Geodark

JMLL wrote: »

You might have known - but I didn't - first car since the tax used to come with the car. The website says you must buy tax before you drive away and that you're buying 12 months and doesn't say anything about a backdated start date. In my view this is misrepresentation.

If the only options are to drive away without tax or to tax the vehicle twice - not a great system is it!?
Think I'm just venting at this stage - but I am going to complain and see where it goes.

The ability to transfer tax is all that has changed, even in the 'old' way if you taxed the car on the 31st it would have been back dated to the 1st

foxy-stoat

JMLL wrote: »

You might have known - but I didn't - first car since the tax used to come with the car. The website says you must buy tax before you drive away and that you're buying 12 months and doesn't say anything about a backdated start date. In my view this is misrepresentation.

If the only options are to drive away without tax or to tax the vehicle twice - not a great system is it!?
Think I'm just venting at this stage - but I am going to complain and see where it goes.

So assuming you bought it from a dealer then you wouldnt of had a choice as the car was probably untaxed on their forecourt.

I would put this down to experience and move on, you will not get anywhere apart from getting the hump when they reply and say tough, it isn't the dealers VED system, at worst they have worded their website badly.

Think of it like this - if your driving a car that is in "L" group (226-255 co2) your paying £540 a year VED - thats £45 per month / £1.45 a day. Not really worth taking it further as your probably in a car that will struggle to get 30mpg. Your paying 20p per mile for the fuel, maybe more, which is around 200 miles.......average folk drive 12,000 miles a year and will pay around £2400 for the fuel in that time - its just another cost.

If your VED is less than that the money that you have "lost" is insignificant as it would of meant that you haven't broken the law of the land.

fred990

It's a scam. There's no reason a computer system couldn't have billed you for just the single day then another twelve months. I routinely SORN (cars, bikes, van) on the basis that one might not be used that month, it's just a tax on ownership. I'm wondering if the £40k band has stymied sales at all? You can get there on a vw golf!

foxy-stoat

The REAL scam is fuel duty and the oil companies who control the cost of the fuel, but thats for another rant.

Not really a scam - its been that way since the start its just since you cannot transfer the VED when you sell and computers have made it easier to catch folk who do not pay the VED when they should.

Gone are the days when you will only get caught if the police actually pull you over for no VED.

Why would the DVLA change the why their systems work for the odd few who lose out a few days worth of VED when the buy and sell their cars....it would cost them many thousands of pounds to do so...they will probably increase the rates to pay for it anyway.

droopsnoot

The change in whether tax is carried with the vehicle hasn't made any difference to when VED starts. It has always (as far back as I've been driving a vehicle) started on the first day of the month that you purchase it.

I haven't done a "new VED" for a vehicle for a long time - when it was done on a paper form or at the Post Office within a couple of days of the end of the month, there was an option to "start now" (in which case it starts at the beginning of the current month) or "start at the beginning of next month", in which case the vehicle is still not taxed until, in the OPs case, April 1st.


I doubt the OP has any chance of a refund from anywhere, as it's not really anyone else's fault that they didn't read the bit where it tells them when the VED starts and ends. If there was no choice but to apply for VED on March 31st, then there is nothing to be done.


Yes, there's an argument that it could be changed to work on a day-by-day basis, but as I commented on at least one of the other threads that pop up on this subject on a regular basis, there's no incentive for the DVLA to spend the massive amount of money that government IT projects always seem to cost for the few motorists it will affect.