Over the past decade, it’s become more important to officially declare non-running vehicles as being kept off-road.
First in 2011, Continuous Insurance Enforcement was introduced, which meant uninsured vehicles were automatically detected using a central database.
Then in 2014, paper tax discs were abolished as Vehicle Excise Duty, better known to most of us as road tax, also moved over to a digital system.
As a result, if you have a car that is not taxed or tested, it’s essential that you get a Statutory Off-Road Notification (or ‘SORN’) to tell the DVLA you are not driving it.
How many SORN notices are there in the UK?
The Department for Transport publishes a full list of SORN notifications by make and model of vehicle, and the latest full data available is for 2018.
During that year there were more than 2.74 million SORN notices in the UK. That’s one for every ten households nationwide.
SORN notifications serve several purposes. They can be a temporary measure, for example if you buy a car but don’t plan to drive it for several months.
They can tell the DVLA that a car is not road-worthy, but that you haven’t scrapped it yet, such as if you are using it for spare parts.
And for many motorists, SORN notices are just a way to legally stop paying tax and insurance on a car you then forget about.
Garage goldmines and forgotten fortunes
Do you have a SORN vehicle you’ve been planning to scrap? SORN notices only apply to cars parked off-road – it could be in a driveway, garden, garage, field or barn.
If you have a scrap car parked on the road without tax or insurance, it’s even more important to get it legally taken away to avoid a fine arriving in the post.
While we don’t know exactly how many SORN notices relate to cars destined for the scrap heap – rather than those undergoing lengthy repair work – they could number into the millions.
That’s an absolute goldmine of scrap car money waiting to be claimed, at a time when many of us are discovering we don’t need our cars nearly as much as we thought.
How much is my scrap car worth?
If you have a SORN car to scrap, fill in our website form to request a scrap car quote based on some simple information like the make, model, year and engine size.
We can scrap runners and non-runners, so we’re happy to arrange collection from your property or from the roadside for broken-down vehicles as required.
Finally, if your car has let you down during an essential journey under social distancing rules, it might be worth investing in a new vehicle as soon as it’s possible to do so – and we are already expecting a surge in scrap car quote enquiries once ‘quarantine’ comes to an end.
