The disorder that surrounds the UK’s number-plate system should be considered a national system failure requiring widespread media attention and immediate government action.
There are a lot of details to cover here, so I’ll to be as succinct as is possible. Some key facts:
- Many countries have just one official supplier and treat number plates as the vehicle passports they are, but we have over 40,000 registered firms supplying 15 million number plates each year in the UK, where there are 41m vehicles.
- Up to 50% of private-hire vehicles at airports, and an estimated 5% of all traffic (equivalent to 2m vehicles), have number plates that are invisible to ANPR cameras.
- Vehicles with ANPR-blocking plates have been linked to everything from fuel theft, to organised criminal activity, including grooming gangs.
- The DVLA reportedly has just six officers to ensure that those 40,000+ firms are producing plates that adhere to strict regulations.
- No background checks are carried out on suppliers, it costs just £40 to register with the DVLA, and the materials and tools required to make authentic-looking plates can be purchased cheaply and easily online.
- Firms selling illegal number plates operate in plain sight, some boasting of their products’ ability to assist in the thwarting of law enforcement, promoting their wares on social media.
- The previous government administration was warned of the issue five years ago, yet no action has been taken despite straightforward solutions existing.
The above information comes from a variety of sources including police, local councils, Trading Standards, legitimate number-plate firms and ANPR camera manufacturers.
It’s worth highlighting how important automatic number plate recognition technology is in this country. Away from private bodies like parking firms, around 18,000 ANPR cameras are operated by authorities, scanning number plates 33 billion times a year. Rightly or wrongly, these cameras are essential: they keep roads and towns running vaguely smoothly, monitoring traffic volumes while enforcing speed limits, emission zones, box junctions and the like.
ANPR and law enforcement
ANPR is a key tool for police as it facilitates the tracking of individual vehicles of interest across the road network, while also allowing intelligence ‘markers’ to be digitally attached to registrations.
For example, if a vehicle has been used in a robbery, its number plate will trigger alerts when it drives past a roadside ANPR camera. Similarly, if a car is associated with gun crime, a marker can be placed against its registration, with officers warned when the vehicle’s plate is scanned by a camera. ANPR is used regularly by counter-terrorism officers and, to take one concrete example, the technology was instrumental to the 2021 capture of Wayne Couzens.
ANPR can be evaded by ‘cloning’ a car, which involves fitting it with a registration copied from an online advert for another vehicle of the same make, model and colour. This is the traditional way of circumventing the system and, while common and seriously problematic, the tactic has a shelf life as it is generally detected once the owner of the cloned car reports he or she could not have attracted, say, a speeding ticket issued to the clonee vehicle.
Technology has since moved on, and nefarious individuals have become wise to the fact that traffic, speed and law-enforcement cameras rely on infrared. This is sometimes known as infrared light (it’s how TV remotes work), but it is actually electromagnetic radiation that, while invisible to humans, is present at night as well as during daylight hours, making it well-suited to roadside applications. Infrared images can also be easily encoded so optical character recognition software can digitally ‘read’ number plates.
Infrared does have a weakness, though: it can be totally reflected or completely absorbed by a number of materials.
This means plates can be covered in a transparent films and sprays that cause ANPR images to ‘flare out’, making registrations unreadable. Similarly, ‘3D’ number plates are composed of raised acrylic characters glued onto the base plate, and an additive can be added during the manufacture of acrylic, making some of all of a 3D plate’s characters unreadable.
These are known as ‘ghost’ or ‘stealth’ plates, and while to the naked eye they look normal so don’t arouse suspicion, they make a car all but invisible to law enforcement, effectively removing its fingerprints. These techniques have surged in popularity in recent years, not least as they don’t require a victim with a cloned car who would eventually alert authorities to an individual issue.
Add in ‘magnet plates’, which, as the name suggests, allow different registrations to be swapped between cars with no more difficulty than a child’s drawing is attached to a fridge, and it’s clear the UK has a serious problem on its hands.
Uncontrolled plate production and supply
Given the importance of standardised, unmodified number plates, it is incomprehensible that we allow over 40,000 private companies to officially supply them – and that’s before one even begins to consider the companies that make plates without registering. In some European countries only one or two manufacturers produce number plates, with the entire process effectively a government endeavour. These countries must look on our system, aghast.
And it’s not just that companies in the UK can register (or not bother) to produce plates: there are no controlled supply chains for materials, no security measures are required to be present in these materials, and no meaningful routine checks exist to ensure manufacturers and suppliers adhere to the rules. With over 40,000 firms selling 15m plates, how could there be?
You can even register to become a plate supplier as a side hustle for the operations of another, unconnected business, and the manufacturing process is so straightforward it is known to sometimes be conducted from spare bedrooms. UK number plates might as well comprise crayon on scrap paper, sticky-taped to vehicles.
Moreover, there is no good reason why anybody would knowingly affix a ghost, stealth, or cloned plate to their vehicle. Ask yourself: when changing cars, have you ever done anything other than diligently print your name on the change-of-keeper section of the V5C logbook, being sure to cut the right section from the form? What reason would compel you to go online and order illegitimate plates, then go to the hassle of affixing these on your car?
Maybe you’re sick of speed cameras and would like to drive at outrageous velocity with impunity, or have an older car and want to evade London’s ULEZ charges.
Perhaps you have more serious criminal intent and want to steal petrol; or something more valuable; or commit any number of crimes that would leave you far less likely to be caught if you use a plate that can’t be read by police cameras. Whatever the motivation, nobody is buying illegal number plates to drive a football club’s minibus; fitting a moody plate is a deliberate act, and it’s one that is facilitatory to other crimes.
I investigated this subject in 2019 and again in 2020, asking police about their number plate stops, and buying from online vendors plates that would be illegal to display on the road (copied from a car for sale; spelling a banned obscenity; with illegal spacing). These companies advertised, with a wink, that their authentic-looking plastic rectangles were ‘show plates’, only to be attached to a vehicle when it was off the road at a car show or similar.
Firms like this continue to operate, but have since been joined and largely superseded by purveyors of ghost and stealth plates and films, with these products promoted overtly on social media, brought up either by adverts, algorithms or simple searches.
A solution in plain sight
This is clearly a significant problem, but shouting words to the effect of ‘we’re all doomed’ does little good, so it is fortunate that there is the will and wherewithal to improve things.
In July 2020 a group of businesses and organisations including reputable number-plate firms, police organisations, the Home Office and DVLA shared a detailed report with the Department for Transport, spelling the issue out in plain English, and setting out how it could be solved cheaply, easily and quickly – think holograms embedded in plastic, controlled material supply chains and basic background checks for suppliers – nothing too fancy.
The UK was in the grip of covid at the time of this report and no action was taken, yet with the spectre of lockdowns now long gone, the problem not only remains, but has exponentially worsened.
We are now, thanks partly to the intervention of Sarah Coombes MP, who is tabling a Bill in the House of Commons that seeks to toughen penalties for people caught with dodgy plates, at an inflection point, and inaction is inexcusable. It would even be politically expedient for the current administration to remedy the situation, as this was a ball dropped by the previous government, and one that can be picked back up again simply by listening to the advice of experts and implementing their off-the-peg solutions.
Returning briefly to ANPR, this was invented in 1976 by the UK’s Police Scientific Development Branch, which evolved into the Home Office Scientific Development Branch, then the Centre for Applied Science and Technology, before morphing into the MoD-controlled Defence Science and Technology Laboratory. Given this technological backdrop, and that previous warnings have not been heeded, it seems fitting to set the issue out in simple, programmatic terms:
The UK has a rare system error and an urgent update is required. Admins please implement.
