Trevor Laffan: It’s high time we lost the paper discs on cars and went digital

Why, in 2025, are we still clogging up our car windscreens with pieces of paper?

Tax discs, insurance discs and National Car Test (NCT) certificates all fight for space on the one place every driver relies on to see where they’re going. The one space that should be absolutely clear, to give you the best possible sight of potential danger.

Every year, we gather these glorified post-it notes, tear them out by their serrated edges, and stick them into the little holder on the windscreen. Then the obsolete pieces go into the recycling, along with all the paperwork that came with them.

Generating that amount of paper takes a lot of effort and expense, not to mention trees. In the UK, it was estimated that they saved £10 million by using paperless tax discs alone when they introduced it 10 years ago. Understandable, when you consider the labour involved in the paper-based system.

The discs and the covering letters are created and printed by people. People also put them into envelopes, address them, and apply the appropriate postage for delivery. Then more people like Postman Pat trudge around in all weathers delivering these things.

It’s about time we caught up with the rest of the world, who have long since figured out a better way to do it.

In most civilised countries, you simply apply online to the appropriate department and once the application is processed, you receive a confirmation email in return and your details are automatically linked to the registration number of your car.

Attaching the information to the number plate gives you a clean windscreen. It suits the police too because they can access the data on their hand-held devices through Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) so they no longer have to waste time trying to decipher badly positioned discs through dirty windscreens.

It does away with forgeries too. In my policing days, I often came across these and many were so bad they could have been created by a child. And they’re still at it.

One recent road user’s particularly poor attempt to forge their tax disc resulted in their car being seized when it contained a crudely handwritten expiry date of ‘09-23? written in pencil.

Sometimes, drivers even blamed their children when a tax disc was missing from the windscreen, claiming it was there the day before, but the children must have taken it. A bit like the dog ate my homework

Gardaí recently seized another car after a learner driver was found to be driving with dodgy tax, insurance and NCT discs. All three were forgeries.

Swopping the same tax disc between several cars wasn’t unusual either, and apart from the lost revenue to the State, these incidents also wasted garda time.

So, it’s about time a paperless system was introduced to make life easier for everyone.

In Cyprus, for example, road tax can be renewed between the end of the first week of January and a date in the middle of March each year. After the March cut-off date, the police will prosecute those who have not renewed their tax and a fine of €10 + 10% of the rate of tax for the vehicle will be levied after that. If the tax is not renewed for a full year, further penalties apply. Simple.

They introduced the same thing in the UK back in 2014. According to MoneySavingExpert, a money website in the UK, paper road tax discs were abolished and drivers no longer needed to display them on their car windscreen as the system moved online.

The move had been announced by the UK Government that year after more than 90 years of issuing drivers with paper tax discs. The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Authority (DVLA) said getting rid of the physical disc would save the taxpayer millions every year.

An Garda Síochána already has access to ANPR, which uses optical character recognition technology to automatically read vehicle registration plates. It is used in patrol cars by many police forces worldwide.

The technology can read number plates at a rate of six per second on vehicles travelling up to 180km/h, so we should be using it more.

As far as I can see, Ireland is one of the last remaining countries sticking with the paper model, but that might finally be about to change.

According to a recent news story, the Government approved in July last year the formal drafting of new bills to end the need for paper tax discs.

Cabinet approved the drafting of the National Vehicle and Driver File Bill 2024, which includes provisions to abolish the requirement to display a motor tax disc.

Car tax, insurance and National Car Test (NCT) discs will be digitised at the same time, with plans to do so being explored by Government officials.

Operators in the insurance sector believe car documentation is likely to go paperless from the start of 2026, although no formal plans have been announced.

The Motor Insurers’ Bureau of Ireland (MIBI) has been providing a daily motor insurance database to identify cars driving without insurance since November, 2023, and the information displayed in paper discs is already available to Gardaí in digital form so it shouldn’t be difficult to change.

Paper discs verifying tax, insurance or NCT/CVRT have become an unnecessary imposition, and Insurance Ireland, says the removal of them would eliminate some costs for insurers.

However, they also warned that enforcement to prevent uninsured driving, and a potential “tendency to try to avoid detection”, would offset any financial gains.

What that means, in other words, is that while the elimination of insurance paper discs is expected to generate significant savings in administration costs related to printing and postage, those savings are unlikely to be reflected in my annual premium.

So, what else is new?