As you know from my earlier ramblings, Mrs Rambling Motorist unfortunately wrote my lovely Skoda Octavia Scout off in March, and was injured in the accident. I can report that she is nearly recovered from her injuries, but, the mental anguish is taking a little longer. This article will detail how I transferred my private plate from the written off car, onto retention until I sourced the new car “James”, then transferring the plate onto my new car. Expect this article to get technical with DVLA terms. Where necessary, I have redacted personal information and certain codes from documents for security, but, you will still get the gist of what process you need to go through to effect your number plate transfer.
“Oskar”, my Octavia Scout wore a private registration plate, not because I wanted to hide his age, I have been more than happy to share he was a 2008 model, and proud that he had covered 252,000 miles. The reason I wanted a private plate was for personal reasons, something that meant something to me, and I can always remember my own registration plate when needing to enter it into a car park payment meter. I have a previous rambling article explaining the choice of my personal plate MOI1100 if you are interested.
The first thing I did when I found out “Oskar” was a category A write off, a car that cannot be put back on the road for safety reasons because it is too badly damaged, was to stop paying road tax, and declare SORN (Statutory Off Road Notification). Once SORN is declared, any direct debit is automatically cancelled by the DVLA. If you have paid for 6 or 12 months road tax up front, like I have on “Bluebelle”, then an automatic refund will be issued to the person on the address on the V5 logbook, less a month for administration costs. Here, you can see, two days after the accident, I cancelled the road tax on MOI1100 (“Oskar” still having the private number plate) by declaring SORN, and in my case, the direct debit was cancelled.
Private Number Plate Retention Transfer
The next task was to transfer the private number plate MOI1100 from the damaged car “Oskar”. The DVLA has an online process with a few things that you need to check. Basically, you will need your V5 logbook and a payment of £80 (2026). While your vehicle has been wearing the personalised plate, behind the scenes, the original number plate is lurking hidden. As you transfer your personal number plate off your vehicle, the original number plate becomes live again, in “Oskar’s” case, KP58OJS, you will see this reappear in these documents.
Due to the fact that on the 27th March 2026, I had not yet seen the new car “James”, I effectively had no car to transfer the MOI1100 number plate on to, so I elected to go down the private number plate retention route. This means completing V778, an online form, or a paper one as you prefer, and paying the administrative fee to the DVLA of £80.
You will then get a receipt for the transfer, a green retention certificate, and a new V5 logbook in the post with the original number plate on it. At this point, you need to change over your number plates on the car, and tell your insurance company. In my case, as the car was no longer driveable, I simply needed to transfer the new logbook over to Copart in Doncaster who were recycling the car. This was done as soon as the new V5 with the original KP58OJS registration on it came through the post.
Transferring A Retained Private Plate Onto A Vehicle
Now that I had “James” in the fleet, “James” had a less memorable number plate of YF56GFX. This had to be changed, and quickly, as I could see a fine appearing for paying for car parking with the wrong registration.
As I had already paid the DVLA £80 for the retention fee, there was no further fee to pay in order to assign the private number plate to the car. Again completing the process online, see the same link above, I used the retention certificate in order to prove I had the number plate and to assign it to my car “James”.
As “James” has his road tax paid monthly via direct debit, the DVLA automatically changed over the direct debit reference from YF56GFX to MOI1100 with my bank. The MOT and MOT history gets automatically changed to the new private registration.
A few days later, yet another new V5 logbook came in the post, this time for “James” wearing MOI1100, and I informed my insurance company, Sainsbury’s Bank, who charged me £25 in administrative fees for the change over and the issue of a new Certificate of Motor Insurance. I also had some new number plates made up because the front on “Oskar” was damaged. Typically, these would cost around £15 to £25, but, because I needed an extra number plate for my trailers, (see the fleet), a front plate and two rear plates cost me £30, and some double sided number plate sticky pads £5.
Mark Smith
“The Rambling Motorist“