Vehicle Registration Marks Bill

Being on this side of the House, I would never mention former leaders of the Conservative party. I am a driver, and when I drive around the roads of Great Britain I have two hobby-horses—but I can ride only one of them this afternoon: the one about number plates. The second hobby-horse is about the number of vehicles on our roads with inadequate lighting at both front and rear. I know that lights are expensive to renew, but it is dangerous to travel in that way. My first hobby-horse is number plate recognition. When I spent 30 days with Greater Manchester police I was on traffic control for two complete shifts in a Range Rover fitted with one of the first pilot automatic number plate recognition readers. I was amazed even at that time—the technology is much better today—by how much information the police drivers could get about a vehicle in front of us. They could tell whether it was a stolen car and whether the insurance and road tax had been paid, and get other information relevant to the work of the police, too. However, there were often problems in recognising number plates, and many of which were personalised, and the Bill is about personalised number plates. Undoubtedly, the market for personalised number plates has taken off in a big way. Occasionally I flick through the advertisement pages of my Sunday newspaper, or even the daily papers, and I see long columns of number plates for sale. I must say that they are sometimes rather esoteric, and I wonder whether anyone would ever buy some of the combinations of letters and numbers, but there must be a trade in them. Obviously, people’s initials are a driving force. It is often difficult to read the advertisements; I have to take a magnifying glass out occasionally, because they are in such a small font, but perhaps that is because of my age. I am astonished by the price of personalised number plates, and some figures have already been mentioned. When I look at the prices, I think that people must have more money than sense, yet the prices are increasing. It astonishes me that people have enough money to part with a third of a million pounds to buy a number plate that they want for one reason or another. MP1 has been mentioned, and I am surprised that that is worth only £20,000. I wonder how much PM1 is worth.