This week I learnt that if you buy a used car with personalised plates that these plates don’t belong to you until the owner completes a Transfer of Entitlement (via Licensys, the plate issuing company).  This is in addition to doing the normal ‘change of ownership’ through Waka Katohi.

The long version.  Back in the early 2000s I bought a car of a secondhand dealer with some personalised plates on it.  The plate related to the car model so the original owner had no interest in keeping the plates.  Fast-forward to earlier this week, the car has stayed within the family all these years and currently belongs to my sister-in-law.  She has bought a bike carrier and wants to get a supplementary plate and was promptly told she can’t have one because the plates don’t belong to her, even though the car is registered in her name.  I rung Licensys to see if the plates were perhaps in my name, seeing as I bought the car of a dealer and you’d kind of hope that they’d know about this stuff.  Turns out they must have been just as ignorant of this ‘Transfer of Entitlement’ requirement, the plates are still in the name of the guy that they bought the car of.  Fortunately the woman who answered the phone was very friendly and helpful and said “this happens all the time”.  It’s  fairly straight forward to sort out, all my sister-in-law has to do is sent them a statutory declaration to ‘take the entitlement’, it’s free of charge but a bit of a faff in that she needs to get it witnessed by a JP.

I kind of get it, that the car and personalised plates are separate entities but given how often this must happen it just seems a bit clumsy.  I don’t see why they couldn’t build it as an option into the “I’ve sold my car “ process on the Waka Kotahi's website.