Not Taxed for on road use?

A DVLA enigma

The DVLA's online vehicle enquiry service is an incredibly useful tool for car enthusiasts, but every now and again something strange and undocumented will pop up. A handful of vehicles appear without one of the three standard tax statuses of Taxed, SORN or Untaxed, but instead 'Not taxed for on road use' with a green background. These are usually on static display in museums or private collections and haven't changed keeper or been used on the road for many years: XMO 412H, the World Cup Rally Maxi at Gaydon, is one example, and the Stondon museum also had several such vehicles. A number of airport vehicles kept within the private confines of the airport and not used on public roads also have this status.

What does that tax status mean? According to the DVLA it shouldn't exist!

Vehicles with this status do appear on third-party sites such as Cazana that only include those taxed or SORNed in recent years, but the various government websites don't even acknowledge the existence of this mysterious fourth status anywhere, and it has puzzled myself and other enthusiasts for some years so I'd like to know what purpose it serves and why certain vehicles are recorded in this way.



The SORN status was created in 1998 and all vehicles taken off the road after that date should be declared SORN but those that have continuously been off the road since before then can remain untaxed. The majority of museum exhibits are either SORN or untaxed with a pre-1998 liability date, but occasionally the mysterious 'not taxed for on road use' status will appear. Someone did send a Freedom of Information request to the DVLA asking for an explanation, but unfortunately the employee assigned to deal with it failed to understand this request and wasn't even aware such a status existed, so there has been no meaningful response. It must be very obscure if even DVLA staff don't know about it!

XMO 412H definitely still exists but I don't think it's ever left the museum

The most plausible theory is that it is a consequence of the DVLA computer system running out of storage space sometime in the 1980s (or possibly later as M516 SBT is a 1995 aircraft tug with this status). Space was reclaimed by archiving a large number of long-untaxed vehicles onto paper files and deleting them from the computer on the basis that they were dead and these records would never need updating again. That's a sensible solution, except that in those days long before SORN was invented there were vehicles the DVLA knew still existed and hadn't been taxed for years but may have returned to the road and needed their records updating in future. How could the DVLA prevent these from being deleted by what was presumably an automated batch process to remove untaxed vehicles?

A remnant of something to stop untaxed vehicles being deleted?

A few years ago, vehicles that are now 'not taxed for on road use' would confusingly show as 'taxed' with a strange expiry date in the middle of a month, which violates the rule that vehicle tax can only start on the first day of the month. It seems the solution to the deletion issue was to mark these vehicles as taxed with an arbitrary expiry date and implement a process to automatically renew this tax every year to keep them alive on the system. An overhaul of the database fairly recently seems to have turned this into 'not taxed for on road use', but this is all speculation as no official information is available.

SFC 609 is a good example to illustrate this situation. It is an AEC coach that has been owned by the Oxford Bus Museum since the 1970s but has never been driven by the museum and exists only as a spares donor for its sister vehicle SFC 610. When seen in 2010 it had been stripped to nothing more than a bare chassis and was clearly not roadworthy and never going to be again, yet showed on the DVLA system as taxed until 8th March 2011. Checking again in later years confirmed the tax had been renewed every year and it was still taxed in 2015 with the same 8th March expiry date, but is now 'not taxed for on road use'.

Obviously not roadworthy but supposedly taxed

This wasn't the only vehicle so affected as its sister SFC 610, although cosmetically restored, is confined to static display and not roadworthy, and is also now 'not taxed for on road use'. Interestingly, both vehicles had new V5s issued on the same day in July 2005, which are presumably still in the museum's possession, implying they definitely still exist as far as the DVLA are concerned and haven't been considered scrapped. There's no way anyone at the museum would have wasted precious time and money constantly renewing the tax on obviously derelict vehicles that are never going to be roadworthy again, so it must have been an automatic free-of-charge process, but the exact details remain a mystery.

So that's my theory behind those few mysterious vehicles that are 'not taxed for on road use', but it is all just speculation. Have you ever come across this strange status and do you know why? An official explanation in particular would be most appreciated as even the DVLA themselves deny its very existence despite the evidence on their own system!