The Road Fund License Farce     © Eddie French  26th September 2007 In the UK you can now purchase your Road Fund License  (Vehicle Tax Duty) on-line. Unfortunately, this is not quite as progressive as it first seems. Yes, you can order it, then you have to wait for the disc to be sent to you by post by the DVLA. What would be really cool would be for you to buy your license on-line and then immediately print it out using your desktop printer - but you can't So, what is preventing this seemingly sensible idea from the government - a very rare occurrence - from going all the way? It seems that there is the little matter of the law. Sitting on the statute books right now is an antiquated piece of legislation which states that is an offence to 'Fail To Display' a valid tax disc in the windscreen of your vehicle. This means that if your tax disc somehow falls from your screen onto the mountain of rubbish that lives in the dark realm of the passenger foot well, you can be prosecuted and fined. It doesn't matter that you have most definitely paid in full for your road tax. It doesn't mean a thing that you consider yourself to be a law abiding citizen, because you're not. This law is the reason that the little round disc that sits in your windscreen is almost as difficult to counterfeit as a twenty pound note. It really doesn't have to be so. The national vehicle database is a dynamically updated system which contains some really interesting information about your vehicle and even about you. It knows if you have kept your road tax up to date, it knows how long you have had your car, it even knows when your motor insurance is due for renewal. So, when a policeman stops you and checks your vehicle over he merely has to punch in your registration details and he has all of that information in seconds. It doesn't even have to be a human being doing the checking. Drive through one of those Video VCP vans and all this is done automatically and if anything comes of it you will receive a summons through the post, untouched by human hand. In light of all of this working technology, where is the sense in keeping this ridiculously antiquated law sitting on the statute books. The disc on display in your vehicles front windscreen does not need to be counterfeit proofed any longer. The cost of producing and distributing these discs must be enormous. Wouldn't it make sense to to scrap this silly law and save millions of tax pounds by allowing the motorist to simply print out his/her own tax disc at home? Better still, why not scrap the whole system altogether.