My wife and I hit a pothole while driving home from a day out. It burst a tyre and we called our breakdown service provider, Autonational Rescue. The agent informed us that our vehicle’s excise duty had expired 10 days before and that I would need to renew it before they could attend. We have not received a renewal letter from the DVLA and, as we no longer have tax discs, we rely on this to remind us. I tried to renew the tax at the side of the road, but you cannot do this without the renewal letter or the V5C logbook. So we were stuck. We ended up calling a local garage, which changed the tyre at the roadside. We now know to carry our V5C reference number and mark in our diary our tax renewal date. But I do question whether breakdown services can refuse to attend because the car tax renewal is a few days out of date.
MK, Leeds
You are not alone. Since tax discs were scrapped in 2014, the proportion of untaxed vehicles has soared from about 0.6% of the total to a record 1.9% in 2021, when the latest figures were published. Reminder letters from the DVLA are meant to prevent drivers inadvertently forgetting, but the agency tells me it is investigating reports that these letters have been going astray. It won’t confirm how many may be affected.
