With the abolition of the paper tax disc from the 1st of October 2014, motorcycles will no longer be required to display a paper tax disc. To ride or keep a bike on the road, it will still need to be taxed and the DVLA will still send a renewal reminder when that tax is due to expire. This applies to all types of vehicle, including those that are exempt from payment of road tax.
What is particularly concerning however, is that from the 1st of October, when a motorcycle is purchased, the road tax will no longer be transferred with the bike.
New road tax will need to be purchased before the bike can be used, which will play havoc with the secondhand market. Purchasing can be done by using the New Keeper Supplement (V5C/2) part of the vehicle registration certificate (V5C) online or by automated phone – 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Alternatively, machines can still be taxed at a Post Office which issues tax, but these are few and far between now.
If you sell your motorcycle after the 1st of October, and DVLA has been notified, an automatic refund will be made for any full calendar months left on the road tax. This will no doubt lead to spikes in bike sales at month end, as people try not to lose out on either buying or selling, as the DVLA will only ever issue tax from the start of the month.
Ultimately it’s a great revenue earner for the DVLA and those individuals buying and selling second hand vehicles will have to pay more. We suspect it’s probably an unintended consequence of a policy that simply hasn’t been properly thought through, as is so often the case with Agency charged with administering road transport in the UK.