A tale that may be interesting and/or useful...
Last Friday evening I got home to see that my next-door neighbour's car had been clamped (in his allocated off-road parking space) by the DVLA with a large sticker declaring "Untaxed Vehicle" on the window. The tax disc expired in February but it has been declared "SORN" and not used at all since that time, as he's been working in Poland. The clamp and the sticker give dire warnings to anyone trying to remove them. My neighbour was away this weekend and I was keeping an eye on the place for him.
I phoned the council this morning who checked the planning drawings and confirmed my understanding that each allocated parking bay is private land (tied to its respective house via the deeds), and not "public road" at all.
I then phoned the DVLA, and after many menus and recorded messages I got through to an actual human; I explained the situation and pointed out that the law on wheelclamping in Scotland differs from that in England & Wales as it is illegal to clamp vehicles on private property in Scotland [basically it is regarded as "stealing" the use of the car]. The phone operator from the DVLA asked me to fax through the title deeds to their wheelclamping department to prove it wasn't public road! I said not only was that ridiculous, I wasn't prepared to entertain any transfer of the burden of proof from "the prosecution" to "the defence" [I had to repeat this several times as they clearly weren't familiar with such concepts, along with the concept of "exercising due diligence before acting"]. I said that they could consider themselves "notified", and in addition to the criminal act of clamping the car on private property, they could also be facing civil action for trespassing and libel since they'd placed a large sticker on his car wrongly advertising him as a law-breaker.
A couple of hours later I got a text from my neighbour who had arrived home to see that the clamp had been removed...
As it turns out he's about to scrap the car anyway - know anyone who wants a Hyundai Sonata? It runs but test-drives would be limited to six inches forwards and backwards within the bay! ;-)
|
|
Pointless asking for a 24 hour test-drive then ?
|
sonata what a nice car,brings music to my ears
tell your neighbour to make sure he gets an end of life certificate when he scraps the car or the dvla will have his card marked waiting to pounce
|
|
nice to see that those who enforce the law ...know the law ?
|
Didn't someone on this site put a HMG reference that they are to extend excise enforcement to include that outlined above from September 2008 ?
Beware folks strange days ahead.
dvd
|
|
My understanding is that there is no law of trespass in Scotland, only England and Wales.
|
|
|
|
this one? www.honestjohn.co.uk/forum/post/index.htm?v=e&t=56...8
|
|
So a SORNed vehicle will be able to be kept only at a private dwelling, not business premises?
|
|
my reading of that is that the enforcement is intended to apply where SORN has NOT been declared so a SORNed vehicle should still be OK
|
> My understanding is that there is no law of trespass in Scotland, only England and Wales.
I'm not a lawyer but from Google etc. I can't find anything definitive either way; certainly plenty of people proclaim "no Scottish tresspass law" to be a perpetual myth, for what that's worth.
Can anyone point me at something definitive?
|
|
|
|
|
![2020 Vauxhall Crossland X 1.2T [110] Griffin 5dr [6 Spd] [Start Stop]](http://images.honestjohn.co.uk/imagecache/url/crop/90x60/https/cdn.uk.prod.group-mobility-trader.com/images/cas/34104aadcce24392650beeffd8334ad7/23164793e3f024ac411b701feb76e4f6.jpg)
