Number Plates News

'Ten' Plates Available From March

09 February 2010

The two concurrent series of 'new-style' number plate 'date identifiers' will enter their second decades this year, beginning on the first of March 2010, when the '10' series comes into play.

Originally, the idea was that plates issued between March and August would be assigned the last two digits of the year e.g. '01' for 2001, '02' for 2002 etc., with a second series to accommodate issues from September to the following February, which would adopt the format '51' (September 2001-April 2002), '52' (September 2002-April 2003) etc.

Delays in implementing the new arangements resulted, however, in the loss of the '01' plates altogether and the count had to commence instead at '02', in March 2002. It was, in fact, its sister series which eventually introduced the new system with '51' six months earlier, in September 2001. This parallel index will reach '60' in September this year.

If you wanted to devise an unnecessarily complex system that no-one understands, you would be hard-pushed to improve on this. The good news is that both combinations do at least offer some very interesting possibilities for personal number plates:

The figure '60' closely resembles 'GO' when placed in conjunction with the other characters on a plate. So, for example, PA60 DAS looks very much like 'Pagodas' and BY60 NES neatly spells 'Bygones'. Depending on the extent of your imagination, the '10' plates can offer such examples as AL10 WED ['Allowed'], SO10 MON ['Solomon'] or BR10 CHE ['Brioche'].

The first two letters relate to the area in which the plate was issued. The first character is, in fact, a crude mnemonic for the particular region, i.e. all prefixes starting with 'L' are from London and all those starting with a 'W' are from registration offices in the West of England.

For no apparent reason, however, some areas of the country have been granted pretentious titles such as 'G' for 'Garden of England' [Kent and Sussex] and 'F' for 'Forest and Fens' [East Midlands], whilst the rest of the country must make do with rather more mundane descriptions like 'C' for Cymru [Wales] and 'Y' for Yorkshire etc.

For a full list of these 'local memory tags', you may wish to refer to this table.