A vehicle registration certificate is an official document providing proof of registration of a vehicle. It is used primarily by governments as a means of ensuring that all road vehicles are on the national vehicle register, but is also used as a form of law enforcement and to facilitate change of ownership when buying and selling a vehicle.
In the European Economic Area (EU, Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway), vehicle registration certificates are governed by the European directive 1999/37/EC.[1] The information contained in these registration certificates includes:
In the UK the document (V5C) was previously referred to as the "log book",[2] and this name is still common usage. The document is issued by the DVLA and tracks the registered keeper of the vehicle, rather than the owner. When a vehicle is transferred, exported, scrapped or had major modification (new engine, chassis or factors affecting the taxation class) the form is returned to the DVLA, who issue a new document, if appropriate, with the amended details.
A new design was issued in 2001 to comply with EC directive 2001/127/EC? (or 2003/127/EC), not as a result of a theft of blank forms in the same year.[3]
In 2011 and 2012, a programme was launched to replace the previous blue forms with new red forms as a result of "theft of a number of blank V5Cs".[4] The theft may have been of several hundred thousand forms in 2007 and 2008,[5] or the loss of over two million forms reported in 2008.[6] Both or either incidents may relate to blank forms returned to a supplier in 2006 for overprinting which were eventually sent to be destroyed.[7]
The police (NVCIS) launched "Operation Drift" to recover stolen forms, over a thousand being recovered.[8] The relevant serial numbers of the illegal V5Cs are either (according to the police):
or, according to the DVLA reported in Parker's: