A couple of weeks ago our street was visited by officers of the law who clamped several untaxed cars. One was released a few hours later after some negotiation about whether the bit of road it was on is actually public highway (a small part of our road is officially unadopted and the car was SORN-ed) but the others were taken away the very next day, presumably to be destroyed.

To be more accurate, what was left of the other cars was removed the next day as one of them had been stripped for parts in the evening.

There have been similar activites in the past, but this time it seems to be more effective for two reasons. Firstly the cars were clamped rather than just plastered with a notice, and secondly the clamping was done in the early morning, before many people have set off for work. Doing it during the day means that only abandoned cars are dealt with, and not those which are being used by someone to drive to work.

This week we have seen a few cars in Ifield with the same clamps on them, so it looks like a major exercise going on in the town to eliminate untaxed vehicles. All I can say about that is “good”. By definition, the untaxed vehicles will not be insured, possibly without an MOT and none of us who do fork out for all those costs likes to see someone else evading them and getting away with it, so the Daily Mail reader within is satisfied. (Well partly anyway. A true DM reader would like to see the vehicle destruction followed up by heavy fines or corporal punishment inflicted on the last registered keeper)

Apart from that there is the ‘broken windows’ element to it – if you can get away with that, then why bother complying with other laws? I’m all for taking a laid-back approach and showing a flexible and tolerant approach at the margins of illegality but tolerance can be taken too far.

I imagine that the Police or the DVLA or someone else will release figures at some point in the future, boasting about how many untaxed vehicles in Crawley were found and removed and I will be quite interested to read that when it happens. I will be just as interested to know whether this spate of activity is targeted at known untaxed vehicles, reported to the Police, or is being done by plodding around the neighbourhoods and checking. I know that one of the cars removed from our street had been reported to the Police by a neighbour, but that could just be coincidence.

Mind you… its a good job they didn’t do all this a month or so earlier! It took nearly a month for our Mondeo’s paperwork to come back from Swansea so we could get it taxed.