There’s only one month to go until the way vehicle tax is calculated will change.

As the changes will only affect new cars and some motorhomes, we thought we’d have a look to see which areas registered the highest number of new vehicles last year.

The Birmingham postcode area was busiest buying new vehicles, with over 200,000 being registered.

Birmingham was followed by Milton Keynes and Guildford.

It’s no great surprise that postcodes in densely populated areas made the top 10, but it’s interesting that Glasgow (67,780), Manchester (32,177) and Liverpool (26,756) were just outside.

Not everybody will be affected by the changes immediately. The changes only apply to brand new cars and some motorhomes registered with DVLA on or after 1 April 2017. But we still wanted to make sure that everyone is aware at the same time, so we’ve been blogging regularly to let you know what DVLA’s been doing to get ready for the changes. We’ve been busy in other ways too, including:

• working very closely with stakeholders to make sure that they’re aware of the changes, including several webinars, such as for the fleet industry
• developing a new service to register new vehicles which will launch later this year.
• launching a publicity campaign that’s being run across social media, blogs and messages on DVLA literature
• getting our contact centre ready, who have an automated telephone service to quickly answer your questions

The changes take effect from 1 April 2017, so make sure you have a look at the new vehicle tax rates to see if they affect you.

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Back in September 2016 we blogged about how DVLA is developing a new web service for our stakeholder customers to register new vehicles.

Since then we have continued to develop the service based on customer feedback.

Last month Alison Wolley (Corporate Services Relationship Manager) and I were invited to exhibit at the Motorcycle Trade Expo event in Coventry by the Motorcycle Industry Association.

This is an ideal opportunity to spend time with our customers and chat with them face to face.  We set up camp in the ‘Knowledge Shop’ section of the show – a perfect place to showcase the new service.  And that’s just what we did during the 3 day event.

We demonstrated and answered lots of queries about all aspects of vehicle registration and licensing. Knowing that there were customers still using our paper process, we were also able to showcase all of the digital services DVLA offers to help dealers registering motorcycles.

Being present at events such as these is invaluable in helping us to get a deeper understanding of the industry in general and it was great to see this reciprocated in the feedback we received about the new service:

• “this will save me a lot of time and money”
• “this is so much easier to use”
• “this looks like a service I could use, I would be able to register the vehicle much quicker to allow my customer to use their bike”

Many thanks to all that took the time to visit us and we look forward to seeing you again soon at another event.

If you want to be involved in testing the new service please contact us at ved.reform@dvla.gsi.gov.uk

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The way vehicle tax is calculated will be changing for new cars and some motorhomes from 1 April 2017. Time is flying by and we’re just 50 days away.

We’ve been busy behind the scenes and blogging regularly about what DVLA is doing to prepare for the changes internally and with our customers.  Here’s a recap of where we are:

Over the past 12 months we’ve been working closely with stakeholders to make sure they’re aware of these changes.  We’re changing the tax rules ready for 1 April and are developing a new service to register new vehicles to launch later in the year. To support the changes we set up and attended industry steering groups to hear the views of stakeholders, update progress and agree the changes.

We launched our public facing communications in November 2016 and have been informing customers about the changes.  This publicity campaign is being run across social media, blogs as well as through messages on DVLA literature. We’ve also updated GOV.UK with the facts about the changes.

DVLA’s contact centre is running an automated telephone service to quickly answer our customer’s questions.

We also hosted a webinar in January for fleet customers with commentary provided by DVLA Service Designers Helen Jones and Rhian Townsend.

We’ve been keeping a close eye on how these communications are performing and what people think.  From this we know that the most popular query amongst the public is whether these changes will affect existing vehicles. The answer?  No they don’t.  The new rates only affect cars and some motorhomes first registered with DVLA on or after 1 April 2017.

So, the countdown is well underway with only 50 days to go until the new vehicle tax rates come into force.

I’m sure this will fly by so please keep up to date with this topic and others by following DVLA on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and subscribing to our Digital Services Blog.

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From 1 April 2017, the way vehicle tax is calculated is changing for new cars and some motorhomes. These changes will only apply to cars registered with DVLA on or after 1 April 2017. We’ve been working closely with stakeholders over the past 12 months to make sure that in the run up to this, they’re aware of the changes and know what, if anything, they need to do to prepare.

Key stakeholders for the new vehicle tax rules are fleet companies. Traditionally, we tend to speak face to face with this customer base, but this can be time consuming and costly for either side when travelling to meetings. So, we asked our fleet customers what the preferred way of communicating with them would be – the consensus was that a ‘webinar’ would work. We’d trialled a new webinar kit recently, so we were looking for an opportunity to use it for the first time. With our fleet customers keen, this was an exciting opportunity to put our new kit into practice!

Two trials later and we were ready to go live. We sent a link to all who expressed an interest and at 10.30am on 10 January we were ready to broadcast.

In total, 195 participants joined the webinar to watch the presentation and listen to the commentary provided by Helen Jones and Rhian Townsend, two of our more experienced Service Designers.

Behind the scenes (in a room not far away!), colleagues were waiting to answer questions as they came through. We were poised with laptops at the ready to answer all that we could. An hour later, presentation over and all questions answered, the webinar was done.

Feedback we’ve had since suggests that it went down really well. So it’s an excellent example of how sharing ideas and working together with our stakeholders helps us meet their needs. Well worth it.

It also shows that our investment in the webinar kit is well worth having and in future we’ll be putting it to good use for other audiences too.

If you weren’t able to make it on the day you can see the presentation and the questions that were asked during the webinar here

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