Shropshire Star

Banned! The ‘68’ plates that could offend

‘OR68 ASM’ and ‘BA68 TRD’ among registrations that won’t be seen on vehicles as DVLA keeps things clean with September change

Published

A new crop of licence plates has been banned following the September change that brought in the ‘68’ registration.

With each new plate in March and September, the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) prevents registrations that could be perceived as offensive or inappropriate because of the new numbers.

The list of banned plates this time around includes ‘OR68 ASM’, ‘BA68 TRD’ and ‘DO68 SHT’, among hundreds of others.

A DVLA spokesperson said: “Many people enjoy displaying a personalised registration number and there are over 50 million registrations available on our website, with almost endless possibilities of combinations to suit a person’s taste, interests and budget.

“The vast majority of registration numbers are made available, but the agency holds back any combinations that may cause offence, embarrassment or are in poor taste.”

Along with banning some complete plates, any plate containing a certain string of characters is also automatically off limits. For example, anything with ‘BUM’ or ‘SEX’ as the final three letters is immediately ruled out.

While many of these licence plates may be sought by drivers wanting a personalised registration to cause mischief, they’re also banned to prevent any embarrassing automatic allocation of plates.

A car is automatically assigned a registration based on its location and date of registration. The first letter is taken from the county in which the vehicle is registered – Y for Yorkshire, for example – with the second letter relating to the local DVLA office.

Any car registered between September 1, 2018 and February 28, 2019 will have the number ‘68’ following those two letters. The final three letters are randomly assigned.

Sorry, we are not accepting comments on this article.