Comments on: Evading Road Tax is wrong – but not as wrong as the Government Statistics

By: Dave Wilson

Dave Wilson — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 09:32:15 +0000

Note also that this is exactly what I said would be the case before the DfT answered my email.

“The survey contractors almost certainly didn’t have the means to check the DVLA database in real time, and probably didn’t have access to the data, anyway. It seems likely that they would have returned all the data at once, at the conclusion of the survey period. But they probably carried out their own checks on the data before they did.”

By: Dave Wilson

Dave Wilson — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 09:14:05 +0000

I think you have misunderstood two things here.

First, the updates they are referring to are corrections by the private contractor survey teams collecting the data. This allows them to check for errors in the actual collection of the data.

In any case what you're suggesting - picking up late road fund renewals is the opposite of what the problem is - people with valid road tax at the time of the data collection taking their vehicle off the road before the VED database was checked. By waiting like this, the longer you leave it, the more wrong you are going to be.

Not jumping to conclusions is a lesson that the DfT would do well to learn.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 18:22:00 +0000

Sorry to rain on your parade mate but doesn’t the mention of ‘to allow for late updates to be made’ suggest that although the database was checked in September, this was to allow late licence renewals, etc, to show up. In other words, the check still related to whether vehicles were licensed as at June.

Lesson = don’t jump to conclusions.