RADIO 5 LIVE INVESTIGATES CAT A AND B WRITE-OFFS

Radio 5 Live Investigates recently featured a 12 minute article on the sale of category A and B vehicles.  They found:

• Over 1,800 Cat A and Bs returned to the road in last 3 years
• Insurers don't usually check vehicle history when insuring it
• They tried to insure a previous cat B vehicle with 10 top insurers - all accepted it
• Its currently not illegal to put cat A or B back on road - salvage Code of Practice is voluntary
• Police think it should be a criminal offence to return cat A or B to the road

Radio 5 Live's Adrian Goldberg, who presented the feature said they had found that "hundreds of cars coming back onto UK roads despite being so badly damaged in accidents they should have been scrapped"

 

He went on to say that "Logbooks had been re-issued by the DVLA allowing the dodgy motors to be sold again" even though the voluntary code of practise forbids this.

 

The police have told 5 Live they "believe it should be a criminal offence" to put category A and B write-offs back on the road.

A Freedom of Information request to the DVLA revealed that over 1,800 cat A and cat B write-offs had been returned to the road in the last 3 years

 

The programme can be heard here:

 

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05wxg9v#auto

The section on salvage starts at 39min 55secs into the programme and ends at 52min 20secs

 

The programme previously looked at the process in which written-off vehicles can be returned to the roads on 23 February 2014.

MVDA understands that one of the key changes Government is planning to make is to stop the reissue of log books for cat A & B vehicles.

The majority of cat A & B vehicles are correctly destroyed & a COD issued, but there remains a proportion that are not. In the past 12 months, MVDA members have reported more than 300 examples of cat B vehicles being openly offered for sale on eBay.  Despite what the insurers say, clearly there is inadequate control over cat B vehicles.  Having said that, some insurers are better than others in their approach to dealing with this issue.