Takign off personalised number and putting old number back on

kirkster

kirkster

kirkster

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Joined
14 May 2007
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843
Location
London
Hi all, your collective wisdom please guys?

I am flogging my car on which I have a personalized number plate. When I bought this car it had registration AAAAAA (not literally but you get my meaning). I still have these plates. I bought by personalized plate (call it BBBBBB) and put it on the vehicle that I now wish to sell.

Naturally I want to keep my personalized plates. However, dealer said they do not want to get involved in the transfer of numbers. So I want to take BBBBBB off the vehicle and, if AAAAAA is still free, put that back on (since i have the plates still and saves me having to get new plates made up). Of course, AAAAAA may no longer be free, I understand that.

Now, I get the whole "retain' thing from DVLA - £80 for ten years - for my personalized number, it will only be on retain for two or three weeks until I get my new car. But how do I get them to put AAAAAA back onto the vehicle before I sell it? And I want this to happen quite quickly since I want to sell the car in the next two weeks.... Can this all be done on line?

Appreciate your advice since I have never done this before.
 
It all happens as part of the retention process and its all done online.

It will remove the plate from the current car, issue you a new one for the current car (Which is normally the one it had before) and place the other one on retention for £80.
 
You're a superstar Fox, many thanks for that. I will see how it goes tomorrow.

After paying the retention is this active immediately? And can you "retain" again in another year if I repeat this process or is another £80 due if I do that?
 
The £80 I believe includes the cost of assigning it to a new car. If you do this, the retention is gone and you'll need to start over, with a new £80, if you do it again in the future.
 
If you use the online system (which is very good) you can put the old plates on immediately (assuming you have the old ones and you get allocated the same plate again), but you will need to wait for the new v5 before you can sell it.

The other alternative is to do it the old fashioned paper way which should let you do multiple "steps" at once.

I used to queue up for hours at the DVLA on Chester to do all this stuff - the online forms are much quicker, but only if you are doing one thing at a time.
 
I can confirm that is exactly how it worked.
It reallocated me the previous registration number the vehicle had when I bought it and the system will send me a new V5C and retention certificate for my personalised plate within 3-5 days. I was worried it might say "within a month"!
 
I've done this 7 or 8 times now probably and this time is the first time I've actually been allocated a different plate to the original - maybe DVLA thought it was one they could flog for £250 on their plate site :)
 
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