When you’ve gone ahead and changed your number plates to a personalised registration, the last thing you want to happen is to find out your plates aren’t legal. That’s why it’s important to know what is legally required and what’s not when it comes to personalised private number plates.
If you live in the UK, you must have a registration plate on your vehicle. This doesn’t mean that you can stick just any old plate on your vehicle because you have to follow the laws. If you don’t, you could face some hefty fines and your vehicle won’t pass the MOT.
Changing your regular number plates over to personalised plates makes things a bit more complicated. You need to know what the laws are. Here is a short explanation to help keep yourself and your vehicle legal when you’re buying and/or transferring personalised number plates.
Legal Requirements for Standard Number Plates
All vehicle registration plates must follow the standard formats. The format you must adhere to all depends upon when your vehicle was first registered. The formats that are legally allowed are:
- Current standard format
- Prefix style format
- Suffix style format
- Classic dateless format
- Dateless Northern Island format
Take the time to understand each of these formats before choosing the right type of personalised number plates for your vehicle.
Make Sure Your Plate is Legal Before Putting it on Your Car
According to UK law, all personalised number plates must be made of a reflective material. They also need to have a white background with black characters for the front of the vehicle. For the back of the vehicle, personalised number plates must have a yellow background with black characters. What all this boils down to is this: You should follow these laws and never buy personalised number plates with flashy patterns in the background, otherwise you’ll get stopped and fined. So, make sure everything is covered legally before you buy your private plates.
How to Legally Transfer Personalised Plates to Another Car
In order to legally transfer your personalised plates from your car to another car, you must be the registered vehicle owner of the car you want to put the plates on. Don’t make the same mistake many others make and sell your car before transferring the registration to another vehicle you own.
Now, instead of worrying about legal issues you can cruise around with your great looking personalised plates, turning heads wherever you go!
