PERSONAL NUMBER PLATES is popular in the UK as it makes someone more passionate, unique and brandable.
The most expensive one of all time is 25 O, selling for an eye-watering £400,000 in 2014. K1 NGS and KR15 HNA sold for more than £200,000. Lord Alan Sugar’s reads AMS 1, and the Queen owns A7, the first one ever issued in London, in 1903. (Earl Russell camped overnight to get his hands on it.) Personalised number plates may still be seen by the nine out of 10 drivers in Britain who don’t have one as the ultimate (and most embarrassing) proof of the super-rich inflated ego, but they are bigger business than ever.
Figures released by the DVLA, which began selling personalised plates for the Treasury in 1989, reveal that a record £102m was raised in 2015, a £15m increase on the previous year. Since 1989, the DVLA has sold more than 4.5m registration numbers and raised around £2.3bn for the Treasury. Meanwhile, the value of rare plates has soared and a personalised number plate is now seen as an investment along the same lines as fine wine or a Rolex. “It’s a money-spinner,”says Adam Griffiths, personalised registrations manager at the DVLA, “though we did see a drop in sales from 2007-9, partly because of the crash. Last year was the first time we exceeded £100m. We have a million hits on our website a month.”
However Griffiths, who confesses he isn’t “in a fortunate enough position yet” to have his own personalised number plate, insists it’s no longer only a rich motorist’s game. “People sell cars on every couple of years so they like to keep the same number plate. Personalised plates start on our website at £250, and 90% of our plates are under £1,000 so you don’t have to break the bank to get one.”
Along with a six-strong team running five live and four online auctions every year, Griffiths is responsible for predicting which number plates are going to be most desirable. “Each auction has 1,500 registrations for sale,” he explains. Which ones are currently proving most popular, I ask, picturing lots of Game of Thrones characters crafted out of letter and number combinations. It turns out to be duller than that.
“It’s always the ones spelling names that do well,” says Griffiths “Other than that, the least amount of digits do the best. The smallest amount you can get now is two, so in the last auction we had 85 O and it went for £40,000. People like them because they stand out. It looks expensive.”
***Based on Guardian UK
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