Contact
One address, and a real person reading it.
Any Plate Check is run by Vikas Dulgunde. Everything below arrives in the same inbox and is answered by the same person, so the reply times on this page are what one person can actually hold to rather than what looks good in a footer.
Put one of the three words below at the front of the subject line and your message lands in the right queue: Correction, Press, or Privacy.
Why there is no form
A form that silently fails is worse than an address
There is no contact form on this page, and that is a deliberate choice rather than an unfinished one. A form needs somewhere to deliver to. This site has no message store, no ticketing system and no third-party form service behind it.
A form with nothing behind it still shows a thank-you message. The sender walks away believing the message was received, and it never was. That is a worse outcome than being handed an address, so you get the address.
There is no telephone number either. One person runs this site, and a number that goes to voicemail is not a contact route, it is a way of looking contactable.
Postal
Any Plate Check is operated as a sole trader, from a home address that is not published. If a data protection request genuinely needs a postal route, ask by email and one will be given to you directly.
Three routes
What to send, and when to expect a reply
Working days, not calendar days, and counted from when the message arrives rather than from when it is opened.
A figure on the site looks wrong
Subject line: Correction
This is the message that gets read first. Include the page, the figure exactly as it appears, and what you think the right figure is. A link to the publisher makes it faster to settle, but it is not needed. Pointing at the number is enough to start.
You will get either a fix, with the change recorded on the page, or a plain explanation of why the figure stands. If the figure came from a government dataset and the dataset is the thing that is wrong, that is said too, along with what has been raised with the publisher.
Press, research or a data question
Subject line: Press
Questions about method, about which dataset sits behind a particular page, or a request for a figure with its source, are all welcome. Tell us your deadline in the first line and it will be respected or refused honestly, not silently missed.
There is no press office here, and no communications team. One person answers, which means answers are specific but not instant. Figures will always be given with the dataset name and the date they apply from, so they can be checked independently.
A privacy or data protection request
Subject line: Privacy
Use this route to ask what is held about you, to correct it, to have it erased, or to object to processing. There is no account and no mailing list on this site, so for almost every visitor the honest answer is that nothing is held at all.
Requests are acknowledged within five working days and answered within one month, which is the deadline set by UK data protection law. There is no charge. Almost all of these can be answered quickly, because for most visitors this site holds nothing at all.
If a reply time is going to be missed, you will be told that it is going to be missed rather than left waiting. The one exception is the month for a data protection request, which is a legal deadline and is not treated as flexible.
Not us
Things we genuinely cannot do for you
This site reads public records. It has no access to change one, and no standing with any agency to argue on your behalf.
Vehicle records and documents
We cannot change a vehicle record, register a keeper change, issue or replace a V5C, or refund a tax payment. Those all sit with DVLA or DVSA. For a replacement log book, GOV.UK has Get a vehicle log book (V5C). To check tax or SORN status directly, use Check if a vehicle is taxed.
Charges, penalties and disputes
We cannot cancel a clean air zone charge, contest a penalty, or tell a zone operator that your vehicle was compliant. Each zone runs its own appeals process, and the government service at Drive in a Clean Air Zone is the place to start. If our page had the charge wrong, that is a correction and we do want to hear about it.
Advice on a specific car
We will not tell you whether to buy a particular vehicle. Nobody can answer that from a database, and a stranger with an email address is the wrong person to ask about a car they have not seen. What we can do is explain what a report is showing you and where the figure behind it came from, which is usually the question underneath the question. The editorial policy sets out where that line sits and why.