Sorry to upset the apple cart but Statutory Off Road Notification was introduced on 31 January 1998.
Not according to the Government archives. All lost in the mists of time now anyway. Iâm sure that youâre a good ex policeman and are squeaky clean with all your paperwork in order now.
I canât find a handy reference on any of the âofficialâ government web sites but several references (of which Wikipedia is one) agree on 1998.
Look on the government archive sites. The discussion papers about SORN were in place in 2003 with the regulations to come into force in 2004. The government was concerned by the millions of unregistered vehicles in the UK, many of which were being used for criminal activities. They wanted to make all vehicles accountable.
At the end of the day whether you believe Wikipedia or the archives the facts remain the same,
If a vehicle is SORNed it must be kept off the road in the United Kingdom. All SORNed vehicles being used in France are illegal. No difficult to understand really. I would have thought that an ex traffic policeman would be supporting that statement rather than claiming black is white and clouding the situation. I hope that his vehicles are legal in France but who knows.
The Road Vehicles (Statutory Off-Road Notification) Regulations 1997 are the source you seek.
Here is the link http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1997/3025/contents/made
where you can read the original legislation as recorded by the UK National Archives.
No mention of agreeing that it is illegal to have a SORNed car in 2017?
First things first. I was simply addressing your statement that âSORN did not exist in 2003.â As I trust you will now understand you were in error on that point.
I agree that those regulations have been amended and replaced a number of times since then, but back in 2003 it was perfectly legal to send off the SORN declaration, and the âTax Discâ from the post box at the ferry port in order to obtain a refund of unused Vehicle Excise Duty.
Pretty much every reference says 1998.
Robert has posted a link to the legislation - there is a further link in the national archive showing the Jan 1998 date so I think we can put that bit to rest. UK Government Web Archive
I am not going to venture into this part of the discussion 
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I agree with you entirely on that point, and obviously exporting the vehicle from the UK ensures that very nicely.
However, I cannot agree with you when you say âAll SORNed vehicles being used in France are illegalâ.
Provided that the owner either obtains the consent of the UK insurer to continue the coverage in the foreign country, or obtains new insurance in the new country of use, then I donât see that there is a problem with legality.
My understanding of the registration issue is that the French authorities do not require that the vehicle be re-registered, provided that the owner has both previously owned the vehicle in the UK, and does not sell or otherwise transfer ownership to another person. (I have always thought that this is rather odd â but such is life.)
Therefore if the owner can find a French insurer that is happy to write a policy in relation to an English registered vehicle, then there is no problem.
In general it is not a matter of clouding the issue, but rather one of clarifying it.
When it comes to vehicle legislation, it is a matter of what the rules actually do say, rather than what we feel that perhaps they ought to say.
Finally, I regard your comment about the legality of my own vehicles as being irrelevant to the point under discussion, and also unnecessarily provocative. Rest assured that you are welcome to come and inspect my vehicle documents at any time you wish, as I know that you will find them to be completely in order.
Oh come on.
âYour SORN is automatically cancelled when you tax your vehicle again or itâs sold, scrapped or permanently exported.â
Itâs nothing to do with insurance.
Yet again he is trying to blind us with grey facts. He should know that a SORNed vehicle must remain in the UK but he will continue with his charade. I donât know if it was legal to use a SORNed UK vehicle in France on its U.K. plates in 2003 because it had been owned by the same person in the U.K. but I really doubt it was true then. I imported a UK car into Germany in 1999 and anther in 2004, they both had to be registered in Germany within a month. I really canât believe that France was so casual. Also I canât imagine a traffic policeman being too happy about a number of cars driving around where the owner orvuser canât be traced through the registration number. Itâs fiction.
No I donât either and I canât muster enough interest to research it, but I donât see why the same export/import rules wouldnât have applied to a vehicle you were exporting/importing regardless of whether you had bought it 1 day or 20 years prior to importing it.
"Un Ă©tranger qui sâinstalle en France doit-il y faire immatriculer son vĂ©hicule ?
Oui. Si vous vous installez en France et que vous y déclarez votre résidence principale, vous devez y faire immatriculer votre véhicule si vous en possédez un.
La dĂ©marche doit ĂȘtre faite dans un dĂ©lai dâun mois aprĂšs votre installation. Toutefois, si ce dĂ©lai est dĂ©passĂ©, votre demande sera traitĂ©e."
Question, answer, direct from the French government website. How much clearer do you want it?
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Not all cases that land in court in the UK take the word of the police officer as proof. MOH proved that the police officers evidence was flawed because he couldnt actually see the two reference points he had used in his evidence, a bump in the road being one of them. This officer had used this same positionon for over 3 years. My OH defended himself and challenged the alleged speed he was doing and proved the officer was wrong. His vascar hadnt been calibrated as per the law and he couldnât actually see the reference points he used. The prosecution questioned OH ability to measure the road and utilise road plans etc. Until of course he produced his Army surveying qualification. He won his argument. After this case the whiteboxes you see on road surfaces were introduced in the UK so that exact reference points could be used to avoid " ambiguatory" ( or lies) Its more difficult here in France, particularly if you donât have a good command of the language or system. If you know you didnt stop and were unfortunate to be caught then suck it up and pay up. Be grateful you didnt cause an accident or worse still seriously injure someone. If you live here permanently then your vehicle should be reg here and therefore your fine etc comes to your French address like the rest of us.
Hi Christine, well done for your husband.
Just to be clear I didnât mean to suggest that all cases will go through on the word of a Police Officer, just there is precedent for there to be a conviction.
As a sidenote I did pick up a UK ticket on average speed over a distance between two changes in tarmac that had a fixed gap between them (didnât bother to slow because I saw no white dots 
) and could see there was no radar.
Also, the ânot stoppingâ in France wasnât me and I agree, âcommit the offence then pay upâ and âBe grateful you didnt cause an accident or worse still seriously injure someone. If you live here permanently then your vehicle should be reg here and therefore your fine etc comes to your French address like the rest of usâ also.
Thanks Anna for bringing me up to date on the change in the regs which took place in 2009.
Youeâre welcome Robert Do keep an eye on them if it interests you because French regs do tend to evolve on a regular basis, itâs dangerous to rely on knowledge from 10 years agoâŠ
On the subject of which, do we all know about the new CT test thatâs coming in next May? Anyone like me who drives a rather elderly car might be well advised to get their test done before May rather than after, I suspect the new requirements are going to put a lot of old cars beyond economic repair.
Sorry David but you really should refrain from making conclusions that do not reflect the law. For example, what Act and section makes it unlawful to export from the UK a vehicle that has a current SORN declaration ? You have said that such a vehicle MUST remain in the UK ---- so how do you justify that statement ?
Thanks to Annaâs research we have discovered that a SORN declaration is automatically cancelled when the vehicle is permanently exported. Therefore, when the vehicle arrives in France it is no longer a âSORNed vehicleâ, and thus it is incorrect to say that âAll SORNed vehicles being used in France are illegalâ because once the vehicle arrives in France it is no longer a âSORNed vehicleâ, simply because it has been exported.
As I said, I am grateful to Anna for having provided the more recent updates to the relevant regulations because Iâm aware that often there are far more readers of these discussions than actual contributors, and itâs nice to be able to have the matter finally clarified for their benefit.
I would however, ask you to ask yourself whether the use of such terms as âcharadeâ and âfictionâ are actually helpful to the discourse.
I think thatâs something we should all welcome. I must admit that I have always considered the CT examination to be rather lax here, especially with it only being every two years. I hope that they make it yearly, and tighten it up to include such things as cracked and clouded headlamp glass which really does decrease the efficiency of the lights considerably.
I usually do my own inspection before the CT, but last time was unable to do so due to health reasons, and so simply took the car for inspection unchecked. To my surprise it passed without any problem, and then 3 weeks (and very few kms) later the front brake pads were down to the metal. Certainly that is the last time that I shall ever rely on a CT as being a decent check on a vehicles safety, so yes, I am glad that they are tightening up the regulations in that respect.
Thus it is no longer SORNed, nor is it taxed, therefore it is not road legal anywhere including in France. So I think itâs easy to justify saying âAll SORNed vehicles being used in France are illegalâ on the reasoning that SORNed vehicles canât be used on public roads, and for a vehicle to be used in an EU state other than its own it has to be road legal in its country of registration. And thatâs leaving aside the fact that if itâs owned by a resident it has to be French registered within one month; and the fact that the longest a vehicle can be kept by a visitor in a country in which itâs not registered is six months out of 12âŠ
Good for you, I donât particularly welcome it so letâs agree to differ on that too. Theyâre going to be failing cars for non functional features that the owner never even knew the car had, let alone is ever likely to use.
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We came over in 1999, brought our English car with us, exported it from the UK, imported it into France and the insurance company told us that the vehicle was covered for a set period of time during which we by law had to get the vehicle registered in France, obtain a grey card and a French immitriculation number. There are a few old vehicles running about around my area with English plateâs, one or two have been knocking about around here for a few years. I only ever intended to bring our old English car over as a stop gap because I canât see any sense whatsoever in driving around in a RHD, French vehicles might be more expensive, but its all relative, cost more to buy, fetch more when you sell on.
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