Motorcycling is more than just a form of transport so it’s no surprise that a much larger proportion of riders own more than one bike than car drivers have multiple cars. So the launch of a new online DVLA portal where you can access the details of all your vehicles as well as your licence is potentially even more useful for riders than for car owners.
A trial for the service has been launched this week, allowing you to sign up and add all your vehicles. It’s currently in public beta testing phase, so might not be perfect, but we’ve tried it and had no problems so far.
To sign up you’ll need an email address, a UK passport (even one that’s expired within the last 12 months works), and a GB driving licence or National Insurance number. Once entered and your identity is confirmed, the system allows you to add your own vehicles provided you have the reference numbers from their V5 registration documents.
Having signed up, you’ll be able to use the portal to see your driving licence information including details of the vehicles you’re entitled to drive or ride, as well as any penalties or disqualifications present on the licence. It also shows the dates of issue and when it’s due to be renewed.
Once you’ve added vehicles – each needs to be added separately, as the portal doesn’t automatically add everything that’s registered in your name – you can click on them to check their V5 info including the VIN and when you took ownership, as well as their tax status, when the tax is due to be renewed and what it will cost when that renewal comes up. Their MOT status is also shown. If you’ve got a garage full of bikes, particularly ones that you might only keep taxed for part of the year, it’s useful to be able to check in one place to see which ones are taxed and MOT’d at any time.
The service also includes the provision to set up email and text message reminders for tax, either retaining the traditional posted reminders or going all-digital and cancelling them. Of course, just as banks are always keen to replace posted statements with online ones, the DVLA stands to save a considerable amount of money by shifting away from snail mail for tax reminders and going all-digital instead. There are more than 40 million vehicles recorded with the DVLA, so the postage cost of tax reminders alone is huge.
In the future, the DVLA intends to expand the service to allow users to apply for provisional driving licences through the portal, and to carry out their 10-year driving licence renewals online by uploading a photo.
Julie Lennard, DVLA Chief Executive, said: “We are asking motorists to help us test the service. It’s free, and simple to sign up for an account. This new service is being developed and we will be adding more features but we want to give customers access as early as possible so they can try it out and let us have their feedback.”
If you want to sign up, make sure you have your passport and driving licence or National Insurance number to hand and go to https://www.gov.uk/driver-vehicles-account to start the process, which takes around five minutes to complete. The service is only available to GB driving licence holders and doesn’t extend to Northern Ireland where the DVA Northern Ireland is responsible for holding licence records rather than the DVLA.
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