If a customer trades in a car on the 1st of the month, the DVLA will supposedly refund them the unexpired tax (ie from the end of that month). Is the car, therefore, still taxed until the end of the month?
If the car has £Zero tax, there's nothing to refund, so will the same rules apply?
A customer brings a car in to us for part exchange appraisal/service/repair etc, we don't know if it is taxed so we can road test it. (Telling us to ask the customer or "just check on the DVLA website" is a really poorly thought-out answer: who's gonna do this? When? How much time do they think we have? Can they categorically, 100% guarantee that their website will function without any hiccups all of the time... without any exceptions?) How does that work when you have to collect a car from someone's workplace, for example, and they aren't available to ask. And you haven't got access to t'interweb? Do we gamble, or not collect the car and lose the work and get a poor CSI score? Why should we suffer because the DVLA doesn't have a process?
The elderly couple without a computer, who don't trust banks to manage their direct debits, so pay for everything by cheque - what's the plan for them?
It's not just us in the trade that need to understand; it's the whole population. What is the expected timescale for the whole country to be educated in the New Way? I only ask this because I suspect the DVLA have no idea how long it will take and probably rather hope we'll do a bit of the educating for them... if we wouldn't mind...for free...oh, yes and as a reward they'll also add yet more layers of onerous complexity to our over-legislated workday in order to give them something to punish us for when we get it wrong. Cheers.
Here's my view:
LEAVE IT AS IT IS - IT'S A PAIN, BUT IT WORKS!!!
AND REOPEN THE LOCAL OFFICES!!!!