Speeches

Gareth Johnson – 2014 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Gareth Johnson on 2014-06-18.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many people were prosecuted for failure to pay vehicle excise duty in (a) Dartford constituency and (b) England and Wales in each of the last five years.

Stephen Hammond

The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency does not hold this data broken down by parliamentary constituency. Figures are not held specifically for England and Wales. The table below shows the total amount of prosecutions for the offence of keeping or using an unlicensed vehicle in England, Scotland and Wales in each of the last five years.

Year

Total number of prosecutions

2009/10

64,408

2010/11

53,648

2011/12

44,159

2012/13

29,035

2013/14

25,044

The DVLA operates a comprehensive package of measures to tackle vehicle excise duty evasion. These range from reminder letters and penalties through to court prosecutions and the wheelclamping and/or removal of unlicensed vehicles. These measures have helped to improve compliance and the latest estimates show that vehicle excise duty evasion is at a historic low of just 0.6%.