A massive number of vehicles are driving around in Britain with illegal number plates, according to a new report from the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Transport Safety (APPGTS), which blames an outdated and poorly regulated number plate system for widespread illegality.
It has created a rapidly growing crisis that enables criminals and organised crime groups to operate undetected on UK roads, lets dangerous drivers off the hook, poses serious safety concerns and leads to a significant loss of public funds, it says.
The report follows a cross-party inquiry into vehicle registration plates, with new technology recently revealing that more than 4,000 non-compliant plates were identified in a single location in Birmingham in just two weeks.
Ghost plates look normal to the naked eye but are rendered unreadable to ANPR cameras by a transparent film or raised digits made of non-compliant materials, or the careful altering of specific characters.
Cloned plates are also a growing worry with data from Transport for London (TfL) reporting that plate-cloning cases have surged in the capital by 64% in the past three years.
More than 18,000 ANPR cameras in the UK are now capturing around 90 million reads each day, but the APPGTS report says that this is being critically undermined by weak regulation of number plate production, supply and a lack of enforcement.
The inquiry heard from National Trading Standards that ‘ghost plates pose a serious threat to counter-terrorism operations’.
It reported that ‘vehicles with stealth plates can bypass surveillance systems around critical infrastructure such as airports, government buildings and transport hubs.’
“This creates vulnerabilities that could be exploited by terrorist groups planning vehicle-borne attacks,” it added.
