Private Plates

Here the plate belongs to the registration, but it's only been the past decade or so that registration has been transferrable. Before that, you had to end it, return the plates and get a new set.
 
Here you only give the plates back when a car is deregistered for good. You can declare cars out of road use whenever you like in an online service, and save the insurance/tax costs when the car is not in use, but the plates stay on. I always have one declared out of use since I've got use for just two cars at a time.
 
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Which brings me on to an interesting point about plates here. On most cars (there are some exceptions), a numberplate can be retained by the owner of a vehicle before passing it on. By paying a fee, which I think is about ?80 a year, you can keep that numberplate and then use it as a private one on a different vehicle. The vehicle you 'took' the number from then gets reassigned with an age related plate.

A real issue for vintage and classic cars, is referred to as plate rape, whereby a low value historic vehicle is bought solely for the numberplate, and the vehicle is then passed on to someone else. This leaves many old cars without their original number plates, which in my eyes, and many others, are an important part of a vehicle's history, and a real shame that people profiteer from it.

There's a few calling for vehicles over a certain age to have their numbers protected so they can't be stolen like this, but the DVLA would never support such a thing since they profit so well from it.
 
Due to the way things are here it's pretty rare to see a classic car with its original plates. But when you do, it's something special and does usually add to the car's value.

I'm less concerned that the number is different from whatever the car left the dealership with when it was new (it'd be nice for them to be the same) but I'm more concerned that the old plates simply look more period correct than new ones. Seeing an old original car with Day-Glo yellow plates with the latest sequence of numbers is an anachronism and quite unfortunate in my opinion. I love the dull yellows and faded letters of an original plate.
 
Having multiple plates on a car's history documents usually suggests crash vehicle here, and it certainly drops the value down.
 
Yeah it doesn't matter what you do to a car - the plate will (unless you do what Andeh says) stay with the car its entire life.

My Saab had a personalised plate at some point in its life - one owner changed the plates to his own, then when he sold it it defaulted back to the original plates; even though it had been changed. He had even kept the original dealer plates so those are still on the car.

Amusingly it led to a slight confusion when I ran a history check before buying the car; it came up with a possible write off. Phoned the DVLA who checked the vehicle; turned out that owner had written off a Porsche with the numberplate that used to be on my Saab after he had sold the Saab.
 
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