Illegal / Obscured Number Plates (935A/23)
Request
Motorists who display an illegal number plate or an obscured plate can be issued with a Traffic Offence Report (TOR) or a Vehicle Defect Rectification Scheme (VDRS) notice, means they escape a penalty if the fault is fixed within 14 days. Beyond this, if a second offence is caught they could have their number plates revoked.
I would like to know how many traffic offence reports West Midlands Police have made between 1 January 2020 and 8 June 2023 regarding illegal or obscured number plates and how many times those reports were made to a single vehicle – which could result in the number plate being rescinded.
Response
Please find attached our response.
Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from a number of data sources used by forces for police purposes. The detail collected to respond specifically to your request is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when interpreting those data.
The figures provided therefore are our best interpretation of relevance of data to your request, but you should be aware that the collation of figures for ad hoc requests may have limitations and this should be taken into account when those data are used.
If you decide to write an article / use the enclosed data we would ask you to take into consideration the factors highlighted in this document so as to not mislead members of the public or official bodies, or misrepresent the relevance of the whole or any part of this disclosed material.