About Any Plate Check
Somebody has to be answerable
for the numbers.
This site is run by one named person, not a lead-generation funnel with a registration field on the front. This page says who that is, where each figure comes from, how often it gets re-checked, and what happens when one of them turns out to be wrong.
- Written and checked by Vikas Dulgunde
- Reviewed 30 July 2026
Editorial policy
The short version
- Every figure has a named sourceWith a link and the date it applies from
- Yes
- Reference figures re-checked on a cycleBefore April, again in October, plus on any announcement
- Twice a year
- Corrections recorded on the pageThe old figure is never quietly deleted
- Always
- Paid placementNo garage, dealer, insurer or broker pays to appear
- None
- Cost to the readerNo account, no paid tier, no upsell
- Nothing
The long version is further down this page, and every claim in it is one you can hold us to by email.
Why it exists
The free answer that stops being free
Most motoring sites are a doorway. You arrive with a question about tax or a charge, you get four lines of it, and then you are asked for money or an email address for the part you actually wanted. What sits behind that is usually a commercial database, not the public record, and the public record is the part that is free to read in the first place.
So the split here runs the other way. Everything the published record can tell you is worked out in full and at no cost: what a car costs to tax, what a clean air zone charges it, what a speeding band carries, what a company car costs its driver. And everything the published record cannot tell you is named on the same page, in the same panel, with the same weight.
That second list is the reason the site exists. If you are stood at the kerb with your phone out, knowing what a figure does not cover matters as much as the figure itself. A result that looks complete when three of its inputs were assumed is not being generous, it is being misleading at the exact moment it costs you the most.
Nothing on this site asks for a registration number. Road tax bands, clean air zone charges, sentencing bands for speeding, company car percentages, typical repair prices: those are published figures that anyone can look up, and most sites either bury them behind a lookup form or copy them once and never revisit them. Here each of those pages carries the dataset it came from and the date it was last checked.
Nothing is charged for. The public data is free to use under the Open Government Licence, so there is genuinely nothing to charge for, and pretending otherwise would be the first step towards shaping the figures to suit a sale.
Runs the site
Vikas Dulgunde
Founder and editor
Software engineer based in London. Builds and maintains Any Plate Check, cross-checking every figure on the site against the GOV.UK, HMRC, Sentencing Council and DVLA publications it comes from.
What that qualifies, and what it does not
Any Plate Check is built and maintained by one software engineer, not by a mechanic and not by anybody in the motor trade. That shapes what the site is willing to claim. It reads published records carefully, explains what they mean, and shows its working. It does not offer a view on whether a particular car is a good buy, because no database can support that view.
The engineering matters more than it sounds. The commonest failure on a site like this is not a lie, it is a stale number: a tax band copied from a page that changed in April, a charge for a zone that moved from one class to another, a mileage rate that has not been current since 2011. Preventing that is a build problem. Every figure lives in one typed dataset with a source URL and an as-of date attached to it, the page renders both, and the build refuses to pass if a figure exists without them.
The bio above is deliberately short. What matters on a page like this is not a career summary. It is whether there is a named person who can be held to the figures and a working route to reach them. The name is here, the address is on the contact page, and every correction goes out under the same name.
Editorial policy
How the figures on this site are handled
Five commitments, written so that breaking one of them would be visible to you rather than only to us.
One
Where the data comes from
Road tax bands come from the GOV.UK vehicle tax rate tables and the DVLA V149. Clean air zone standards and charges come from the government guidance and from each zone operator. Emissions limits come from the directives themselves on EUR-Lex. Speeding bands come from the Sentencing Council guideline. Company car percentages come from HMRC. Fuel prices come from the weekly road fuel prices series published by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero.
Nothing is estimated to fill a gap. Where a figure is not published, the page says it is not published rather than modelling something plausible. Where the honest answer is a range, it is shown as a range. The data sources page lists every source, its licence, and how often it changes.
Two
How often figures are re-checked
Anything read live from a government API is as current as that API. Anything held as reference data inside the site is re-checked against its publisher on a fixed cycle: all of it before the start of the tax year on 1 April, all of it again in October, and any single figure within a week of an announcement that changes it.
Each of those pages shows the date its data was last checked, and that date is generated from the dataset itself rather than typed into the copy, so it cannot drift away from the number it describes. The fixed penalty for speeding is £100 and three points, for example, and that pair is verified against GOV.UK on every review.
Three
What happens when we get something wrong
Corrections are made in the open. The number is fixed first, and then the page that carried it records what changed and when. Nothing is quietly deleted, because a reader who acted on the old figure deserves to be able to see that it moved.
If the mistake was in the reasoning rather than the number, a charge applied to the wrong class of vehicle for instance, the explanation is rewritten and the same note goes on. Where an error could have cost somebody money, it is described as that, not folded into a general update.
Four
How to report an error
Email hello@kerbwise.co.uk with the word Correction in the subject line. It helps to include the page, the figure as it appears, and what you believe the right figure is. A source link makes it quicker, but it is not required. Pointing at the number is enough.
Reports about a figure are read before anything else in that inbox. Expect a reply within three working days, and either a fix or a plain explanation of why the figure stands.
Five
Nobody pays to appear here
No garage, dealer, insurer, warranty provider, finance broker or breakdown company pays to be listed on this site, to rank higher in a list, or to be recommended. There is no arrangement under which a reader’s click is sold, and no figure on the site is influenced by a commercial relationship, because there are none to influence it.
If that ever changes, the arrangement will be named on the page it affects before a single link goes live, it will be marked in the copy rather than in a footer, and it will not touch the figures either way. A source that pays us cannot also be a source we cite.
Limits
What this site will not tell you
Stated here as well as on every report, because a limit that only appears in the small print is not a limit anybody reads.
Finance, write-offs and stolen markers
Outstanding finance sits with lenders, write-off categories sit with insurers, and a stolen marker sits on a police database. None of the three is published, so no free check can read them, this one included. They need a paid provenance check from a provider that holds that data.
The vehicle condition figure
Where a report shows a condition score, it is calculated from the published test record: the pattern of advisories and failures over time, and how they cluster. It is useful for deciding what to look at and what to ask about. It has never seen the car, and it is no substitute for an inspection.
Legal, financial and safety questions
Reference pages explain how a rule works in general. They cannot account for your vehicle, your address or your circumstances, and nothing here is legal, financial, insurance or roadworthiness advice. The terms of use say the same thing in the language a lawyer would want.
Any Plate Check is operated as a sole trader in the United Kingdom by Vikas Dulgunde.