And then police can be alerted every time they see a plate flagged as being cloned and either find a criminal, or be able to alert the person their plate is cloned.
From personal knowledge of the UK setup, the goals are twofold, mass surveillance plus auto-revenue-generation (intended to raise sufficient to pay for the surveillance infrastructure to minimize the net cost which means auto issuing the absolute maximum number of tickets possible).
Doing validation to ensure correctness of the tickets being issued would be counter-productive to the revenue generation goal; just because police have evidence a crime (like cloning) has happened, does not mean they will not issue the ticket. There is an onus in the UK for the registered keeper of the vehicle to incriminate themselves or someone else for road traffic offences (confirmed by test cases).
Essentially you have to pay up or prove the cloning (and your innocence) yourself - very difficult because you do not have access to the surveillance database that would help you. The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.
That's not how that works. You, as the registered keeper of a vehicle, have a number of duties relating to the provision of information to the police or other relevant authorities upon request. This isn't a controversial provision, something similar exists in practically every jurisdiction in which cars have a unique identifier.
The s172 process avoids the situation where a speeding fine can be avoided by simply not saying who was driving. 172(4) provides a statutory defence which can be advanced by an individual who's vehicle was cloned:
>A person shall not be guilty of an offence by virtue of paragraph (a) of subsection (2) above if he shows that he did not know and could not with reasonable diligence have ascertained who the driver of the vehicle was.
And regarding the disclosure issue
> The core objective of the police is to assert your guilt, not to provide you with any help for your defence.
This is an incorrect statement - the police are obliged to disclose any relevant, unused material (eg material they have that they don't produce in evidence) that will either undermine the prosecution case or advance the defence.
However, if you are being prosecuted for failing to nominate, it is more likely that you have completely failed to return the form rather than returning the form with a note saying that your plate appears to have been cloned, in which case access to the ANPR database is irrelevant because you need to explain why you did not bother to furnish the information rather than police not believing that your vehicle had been cloned.
"Obliged"?
I immediately thought the case of the Guildford Four, and the scene in the biographical film In The Name Of The Father.
IIRC in the film the note in police files said "not to be shown to the defence"... :/
At least in the US prosecutors are obligated to disclose any exculpatory evidence they find, even if they don't plan to use it in court.
> Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay vehicle tax, number plate cloning is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK.
Evidence of number plate cloning would reduce revenue from fines. If the government wants to fine you for not paying your vehicle tax, evidence that someone cloned your plate would be exculpatory, so it's in the government's best interest to not collect that evidence in the first place.
"Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London, so ignore hits for DEADBEEF from anywhere else outside some Nx safety factor of the driving distance from that hit, because it has to be a false positive."
or
"Oh, we hit for DEADBEEF at 11:00am in London and again at 11:05am in London. Our cloud costs are high, so we're only going to store the most recent picture DEADBEEF, and only record the violation from 11:00am and 11:05am."
I guess these examples sound kind of contrived to me, but how long do you retain this kinda data for? 30 days? 60 days? A year?
Suppose you have a system of cameras operated by the various localities. The localities are all storing the data. Then there is a central system that can query all the local systems but doesn't itself store any of the data.
The department issuing traffic citations requests an automated daily report showing every vehicle observed at multiple locations where the two sightings imply an average speed between 55MPH and 170MPH. Then the citations department takes the report and issues a citation to anyone where there is no route between those two points that allows the calculated average speed without exceeding the speed limit.
The report isn't automatically generated if the average speed was calculated to be 490MPH because cars don't go that fast so issuing a citation would trivially allow it to be challenged as a data irregularity, and the report is requested by the department issuing speeding citations rather than the one (if any) investigating data irregularities.
Now you get a ticket for doing an average speed of 87MPH along a route where the speed limit never exceeded 55MPH. You claim it's a data irregularity (cloned plate), but that's a possible speed, because the automated report didn't include the impossible speeds.
There may have also been sightings that would have implied an average speed of 490MPH, but that report was never requested so it doesn't exist. The bureaucracy comes up with some excuse for why you can't run your own reports that don't already exist. You could request the raw data and then do the calculations yourself, but then you have to make a thousand requests to each individual locality, which is purposely too much trouble for most people to bother, and even then there is no guarantee that the person who cloned your plate was spotted in a location that would have produced an impossibly high speed.
The problem with that is that isn't how average speed cameras work, and where speeds are ludicrously high then there is a human operator looking at it.
People make journeys that are illogical all the time and ANPR misreads are common, so there is no justification for having a system that says "this plate has pinged simultaneously 200 miles apart", because what are you going to with that information?
When you trigger a speed camera, the police send a notice to the registered keeper. They don't search ANPR for other hits, because why would they? They're dealing with the single traffic offence in front of them.
ANPR is an intelligence tool. It is an extremely valuable one, but it isn't definitive and no prosecution would stand alone on ANPR data without other corroborative evidence.
Once you're at that level of issue, you're already wasting massive amounts of time and money.
(also, the court case if you take it to court should include the photo showing the car, so cloners have to match the exact model of car from the plates they're cloning)
Is the legal process of discovery not a thing in the UK? Finding evidence that might exonerate you is precisely what that process is for.
I googled a bit to find a decent guide and found one on the HSE’s website: https://www.hse.gov.uk/enforce/enforcementguide/pretrial/aft...
Unfortunately in real life disclosure is one of the many places that the criminal justice system tends to fail to meet its stated ideals. Disclosure is often served late or improperly on run-of-the-mill cases from what I’ve heard and read. There’s a great book called the Secret Barrister that goes into some detail about the UK’s (or England and Wales more specifically) criminal justice system from quite a critical lens.
But if that has parameters they've set to max because they really want that delicious revenue, why not detect cloned plates and charge those people more than the tickets?
The plate is registered to the victim whose plate was cloned. The identity of the perpetrator who cloned the plate isn't known, so how do you issue them a citation?
Or even more basic civil liberties stuff like the use of face recognition against protestors. No, there's always a huge number of people that come out for the right to drive illegally fast instead.
Can this be done anonymously? Otherwise doing such a lookup creates a paper trail, which is generally bad if you're trying to commit any crime.
Not sure whether it's accessible outside the UK.
(and, it was me who replaced the wiper blades then so I know it was right)
Maybe it's hard if you have a classic car with an unusual paint job. Not so hard if you have a white Toyota.
Or, if you want to be organized, you run around with plate readers and log make/model/color/number and then sell that data.