London, UK —
The gap
Registered number plate suppliers must check entitlement and identity before making a plate. But anyone outside the Registered Number Plate Supplier (RNPS) scheme can lawfully buy plate-making equipment and blank plates, and make plates for vehicles they do not own, with no checks at all. The register only binds the willing. Every cloned plate begins at the moment a plate is made for the wrong person.
The proposal
The proposal put to Parliament has two stages. First, make it an offence to sell or supply number plate manufacturing equipment, or blank number plates, to any person or business that is not registered with the RNPS scheme. Second, following that, make it an offence to possess such equipment or blanks without registration, with a reasonable excuse defence to protect legitimate uses such as show plates for off-road display.
Enforced at the point of sale through existing trading standards infrastructure, it would mean the legal plate market and the criminal one are no longer the same market.
What the government has already put on the table
On 7 and 8 September 2026, Transport Minister Justin Madders confirmed in Parliament that the government is considering tougher penalties for using and supplying false plates (consultation closed 11 May 2026, responses being considered), plate verification in the MOT, criminal record checks for plate suppliers, and more police detection equipment and training. The DVLA is also considering a more robust, auditable register of number plate suppliers.
What the review does not yet cover is the equipment route. As long as anyone outside the scheme can lawfully buy the printer and the blanks, tighter checks on the register push the trade to the unregulated layer. Equipment control closes that gap.
What Protect A Plate is doing
The company operates the UK's live pre-manufacture verification network: vehicle owners approve or decline plate requests on their phone, and every check is logged. In August 2026 the network blocked two attempted clone orders in a single month, both reported to the DVLA. A founding cohort of registered suppliers is being onboarded across the UK, with the first suppliers already live.
On 11 September 2026 the company submitted a Freedom of Information request to the DVLA on plate crime enforcement data. On 13 September 2026 it wrote to its constituency MP, Kate Osamor, asking her to take the proposal to the Roads Minister and the Transport Select Committee; a full policy brief is available to media on request. On 13 September 2026 it also opened an enquiry with the DVLA's data sharing team on consent-based, real-time entitlement verification for registered suppliers, designed to sit inside the register review the government has confirmed.
The numbers
11,394 cloning reports were received by the DVLA in 2025, about 31 a day, up 54% since 2020. In 2024, 5,683 number plates were reported stolen, up 68% since 2021
ABOUT PROTECT A PLATE
Protect A Plate is the UK's vehicle registration verification network. It protects drivers, suppliers, fleets and insurers from number plate cloning, fraud and misuse by verifying every plate request against a live register before a plate is manufactured — and alerting the registered owner instantly if their registration is ever flagged or reported stolen. The goal is a UK in which a cloned plate simply cannot be manufactured, because the industry itself refuses to be the weak link. ICO-registered and UK-based, Protect A Plate serves drivers, suppliers, fleets and insurers at protect-a-plate.co.uk.
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