Sarah Coombes: The ghost plate buster

Sarah Coombes MP sees fixing the UK’s vehicle registration system as key to tackling dangerous and criminal driving

Parking is very similar to being an MP. There is always someone who thinks they could do a better job!

My constituency, West Bromwich, is a historic industrial town which has long been at the heart of the automotive industry in Britain. We have lots of big roads and lots of cars. And while I pride myself on my safe driving, and have never had a speeding ticket, unfortunately I can’t say the same about parking tickets!

When I was elected in July 2024, I never imagined that I would become a parliamentary expert in number plates and parking enforcement. But here I am, and I’m very pleased because the rules of the road, including parking rules, really matter. While some might say these rules are just of bureaucratic importance – I would say actually they’re of real political importance. 

When people break the rules with no punishment, when there is a sense of lawlessness and danger that goes unchecked, it erodes people’s trust in the system.

What people in the parking sector do to uphold the rules is important and it makes a difference. 

Ghost plates

Every new MP wants to find a campaign topic to make their own, and I stumbled across mine one grey January day last year when transport secretary Heidi Alexander was visiting West Brom to discuss my area’s chronic street racing issue.

The racing happens late at night, just as the residents in the blocks of flats are trying to get to sleep. Some 40 or 50 cars turn up, roar up and down for 5-10 minutes and are gone before the police turn up. It’s a nightmare for the community and it’s also been deadly – two teenagers were killed spectating one of these races. 

I was telling the transport secretary and local council staff that what we needed was a speed camera when one of the police officers stopped me and said: “Sarah, it’s useless, they’ll be using ghost plates.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard of ‘ghost number plates’. A ghost plate looks completely normal to the human eye. But the plate has some kind of reflective material on it that makes it invisible to infrared cameras and therefore unreadable to ANPR software.

Many of these ghost plates have raised characters – what we call 3D and 4D – but some flat plates also have a plastic coating making them unreadable too. When I Googled ‘ghost plates’ after first being told about them, I was gobsmacked. There were thousands of websites and social media accounts advertising these plates with one clear goal: to go undetected by cameras. 

If you get a ghost plate you can speed through any camera, jump any red light, drive through any congestion charging zone and you won’t get caught. You can also park in any camera-enforced car park, go through any airport drop-off zone, and you won’t pay a penny. 

Even scarier: you can traffic drugs or people up and down the country or deal in stolen goods, and your vehicle won’t show up on the automatic number plate recognition (ANPR) database. You effectively make yourself invisible to the police.

ANPR is one of the most important modern policing tools we have in this country. It’s essential to the police but also essential to enforcing the rules of our roads, and for commercial use – from car park enforcement to toll roads.

If you speak to experts in policing, trading standards and local authorities, they will tell you ANPR is being subverted on a massive scale by these ghost plates. It was these revelations that started my journey – taking me from a number plate novice, to presenting a Bill in Parliament to campaign for stronger penalties for anyone caught using a ghost plate. 

The current penalty for having a ghost plate is pitiful – just £100. No points on your licence. This makes it absolutely worth it if it means you never have to pay to park, use the Silvertown Tunnel in London or drop-off at Heathrow Airport.

I’m glad to report that the Department for Transport and the Home Office have woken up to the absurdity of this situation and agreed in the Road Safety Strategy to make the changes I’ve been campaigning on. 

Once the law is changed, offenders get points on their licence for having a ghost plate and repeat offenders will have their vehicles seized. But the other thing that became clear to me is how broken the number plate system overall is. The parking industry knows more than most how important it is to be able to identify a vehicle and its owner.

In some countries the number plate is regulated almost as much as a passport – you get given one when you pass your test and that’s your plate for life. Or there are just one or two suppliers you can buy plates from. In contrast, in the UK we have 35,000 companies registered as selling number plates – plus all the unregistered ones operating on the black market. 

I would wager that a huge chunk of even the registered ones are selling ghost plates or cloned plates. This situation is making life very difficult for the parking sector… and everyone’s lives more dangerous. I have been pushing to fix Britain’s broken number plate system – and the parking sector’s support could really help.

Public perceptions

I often see the statistic that 10% of offenders are responsible for half of all crimes in this country. When the public see that stat I think they feel angry because the behaviour of a minority can ruin things for the rest of us and they think authorities aren’t getting a handle on it. I think the same is true of those who break the rules of our roads. 

Most motorists are law-abiding. They are at pains to ensure that their tax is paid, their vehicle is correctly registered, they abide by the speed limit and park properly. And while some people are trying to push a narrative around “car culture wars”, I actually think there is a lot of consensus about this in communities.

When I go door knocking and ask residents if I can do anything for them, the most common thing they ask for is speed bumps or a speed camera. Because they want their kids to be able to play in the street, or to drive to work without fearing they’ll be crashed into by a dangerous driver.

People know that it’s this small number of dangerous drivers and antisocial parkers who put the rest of us at risk. These are the people who are ignoring and exploiting the system. The ones who routinely break the speed limit, don’t pay their penalty charge notices (PCNs) or are using dodgy plates. 

Non-compliant behaviour on our roads is having an impact on us all. It undermines the basic British value of fairness and it’s costing us all dearly.

The cost of non-compliance

I know that parking costs are a sensitive subject. There is a debate to be had about the balance between the costs of parking and economic growth on the high street. I feel the pain as much as any driver when you think you’ve done the right thing but get slapped with a parking ticket. But we need to talk about is the cost to ordinary drivers and the system of those who don’t follow the rules, and the holes in the system itself.

In the past I would see cars with five or six tickets on their windscreen and just thought ‘Gosh, that’s someone with money to burn’. But since I started doing this work I’ve realised how much of an issue unpaid fines are. I have heard stories of individual drivers owing local authorities thousands of pounds in unpaid PCNs. I’ve also heard stories about so-called ‘NIP farms’ (Notice of Intended Prosecution) and the increase in cars on our roads with no registered keeper. Even if the number plate can be read – there is no one and no address to send the fine to.

I recently asked my council, Sandwell, how much was owed to them. I was absolutely shocked to discover that almost one-third of PCNs had gone unpaid since last April. This equates to over £1.2m! Councils are not flush with cash. And I am thinking of all the libraries and youth clubs in West Bromwich that £1.2m could be put towards. This is not fair, this is public money.

We also have a huge problem with untraceable vehicles and car insurance, which is hurting our economy and exacerbating the cost of living crisis. I’ve been doing a lot of work with the Motor Insurers Bureau and it tells me that every 20 minutes someone is the victim of an uninsured or hit-and-run driver.

This is costing the UK economy £1 billion per year and it’s sending all our premiums up. The rise in collisions where one party cannot be traced – either because they drove off or because their plate can’t be read or there’s no registered keeper – is adding up to £50 to every driver’s annual insurance premium. 

I’m not naive, I know we’ll never be able to achieve a world where no one breaks the rules, but I think there’s so much more we could do within the system to make the rules harder to flout.

Data is the key

My final point is about the importance of data. Better enforcement is necessary and absolutely essential if we’re to have fairer, safer roads. My view is that driving is an earned privilege, not a God-given right. But without up-to-date registered keeper data, how can we know who is really driving on our roads?

Unfortunately, the DVLA’s database is woefully out of date. It’s far too easy for cars to have no registered keeper at all. 

I learned this first hand when out with the roads police in West Brom. The ANPR kept dinging every 30 seconds and when I asked the officer what was triggering it, he said they were all vehicles with no registered keeper. When I put this to the DVLA I was shocked to find that this was true of 7% of all vehicles on our roads. And there are plenty more where the registered keeper details are wrong or out of date. 

Of the 50,000 total PCNs issued in my borough since last April, I wonder how many have not been paid because someone had a dodgy plate, or couldn’t be tracked down because there was no proper keeper data? I’m sure this is something that frustrates many in the parking sector. So I am pushing the DVLA to up their game and modernise. This starts with number plates. We have to wrench back control of the current number plates Wild West.

But we also need better ways of handling vehicle and driver data to make it easier for drivers to update their details, for local authorities to enforce and for info about persistent rule-breakers to be shared with the police. Taken together, this will stop so many criminals having free-reign and allow local authorities to claim the money they’re owed. Money that should be invested in road safety and maintenance.

Dangerous parking, non-payment of fines, persistent evasion, illegal plates: these are not victimless crimes. And it’s us, the law-abiding public, who are paying the price.

I hope the parking sector can see is that you’ve got an ally in Parliament. The government is consulting on the road safety strategy – including plans for number plate reform. Please do respond to the consultation in favour of fixing our broken number plate system. The voice of your industry is crucial in this.

Roads are the blood vessels of our nation – and we have rules to police them for a reason. And when the rules are flouted, it impacts us all. I look forward to working with the parking sector so we can improve life for everyone in our communities. 

Sarah Coombes is Labour MP for West Bromwich
www.sarahcoombes.co.uk