Kettle - Resurrection Shuffle - 2

I had to stretch my lunch break to er, breaking point to get the Post office part of things done so I have a taxed but unusable bike.

It wasn't as straightforward as the DVLA website would have you believe though. As I don't have a V11 (the tax reminder they send out) and as the bike was SORN (Statutory Off Road Notification) there was no record of it being taxed for a few years.

On visit one the guy at the PO took the V5C (log book as we call it) and the V112 (MoT exemption declaration) and the printout of the web page,. He couldn't get past the first hurdle, telling me to call the DVLA.

I walked briskly back to work and called. Amazingly it took around a half dozen "press 1 for blah-blah, 2 for blah-blah" before I got a human person to speak to.  She listed to my problem.  "On page 2 of the V5C, section 7, write HISTORIC in the box and sign and date it, then go to the PO". I did.

Visit 2.  In and five minutes a different bloke had given me a receipt for the tax priced at £0 and was sending my log book off. A new one presumably with the tax class changed from Bicycle to Historic.

Brisk walk back.

So now the bike is legally if not physically able to go on the UK's and nay, the world's roads.

All this does make me wonder why once the vehicle trips over to 40 years plus 1 second old that they don't do this automatically and record the vehicle as historic? Why do you have to claim the exemptions that are allowed by law?