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Another odd DVLA idea
SteveWalker - 2/9/16 at 07:45 PM

We just sold our old tin-top this evening. The DVLA now offer an on-line system for us to notify them of the new keeper, so no need to post the V5C to them. All well and good. So why is the online service, which is available 7 days a week, only available between 7am and 7pm? When I'm only "talking" to a computer, there is surely no need for "office hours?"

I'd be bloody annoyed if we'd sold it on Wednesday night (only reason we didn't was we were travelling back from a holiday) and couldn't register the sale until Thursday, thus losing a month's road tax as they only refund complete unused months, calculated from when they RECEIVE the information, not from the date of the sale.

morcus - 3/9/16 at 11:32 AM

If you go by post its from the date of sale, I had one that got lost and took more than a month to get to them and still got all the months money I should have. The car was written off and the insurance company had all the documents and held onto them for about 8 weeks.

Slimy38 - 3/9/16 at 12:34 PM

quote:
Originally posted by SteveWalker
So why is the online service, which is available 7 days a week, only available between 7am and 7pm? When I'm only "talking" to a computer, there is surely no need for "office hours?"


A lot happens 'out of hours' even for online services. Sometime in the dim and distant past, the DVLA will have made a decision that not enough people would buy or sell a car after 7pm, so it would be cheaper to take the whole thing offline to play catch-up with the days activities. Most applications do processing in the very early hours and are all done by 2am (even if they stay online), but I have worked on some that need 8 hours or more of dedicated processing to deal with a days worth of transactions.

Or you could read it that they want to screw you out of an extra months tax, which is probably more likely...

owelly - 3/9/16 at 03:01 PM

There's no logical reason why the DVLA can't deal in days rather than calendar months. Apart from money making which I guess is logical..... 😉