DVLA Auctionof Personal Number Plates - February 2008

DVLA held its first personal plates auction of 2008 in Claverdon, Warwickshire last month.

The Top Prices were:

4 DAM - £29,000
RUB 1Y - £21,000
SSS 9 - £18,400
1 EJG - £15,000
63 MB - £14,000
68 JM - £14,000

There are certain letter combinations that cannot be offered for sale by DVLA at auction. This is because the letter combination was issued naturally by a Local Licensing Authority. DVLA can only sell previously unissued registrations.

The JG combination is a good example. The JG combination was issued by Canterbury C.B.C. starting with JG 1 back in March 1929. It was November of 1937 by the time Canterbury had used up the JG combination followed by numbers, the final number to be issued was JG 9999.

Then in September 1963 Canterbury began using the JG combination again, this time with the numbers first, starting with 1 JG. The final number in the sequence to be issued was 1473 JG. Canterbury then began using the suffix letter system in 1963 in line with the rest of the country.

This means that DVLA cannot issue any JG registrations at auction followed by numbers. DVLA can however offer the numbers 1474 - 9999 followed by JG. Indeed a quick search shows that several attractive numerical sequences have been issued.

So what does this mean to anyone who wants a nice JG number plate? The bad news is that it will be an expensive registration as there are very few JG registrations still live in the system. The good news is that a JG registration should always hold its value as DVLA cannot flood the market with similar registrations.