Car check by registration

The public DVLA record is generous about the vehicle and silent about the person. You get the physical and administrative facts — what it is, when it was registered, whether it is taxed, whether it has a valid MOT — and nothing about the keeper. Keeper details are protected under data protection law, so any site promising a name and address from a plate alone is either misleading you or breaking the rules.

Three things people expect and do not get here: insurance write-off category, outstanding finance, and mileage history. Those live in private industry databases, which is exactly why paid provenance checks exist. If you are handing over thousands of pounds for a used car, a paid check is worth its fee; this page is for the free half of the job.

What the free half is genuinely good for is catching mismatches. A seller describes a 2016 diesel in grey; the plate returns a 2013 petrol in black. That is a cloned plate, a typo, or a story worth hearing before any money moves. Checking takes seconds and rules out the most common used-car problem before you spend anything.

Run them in cost order. Start free: this DVLA lookup for the vehicle's identity, tax and MOT status, then the GOV.UK MOT history service for the test-by-test record, including recorded mileage at each test and every advisory an examiner noted. Our MOT history check page explains how to read that record.

Then pay for the parts the state does not publish: a provenance check for finance, write-off category and stolen markers, and — if the car is worth it — an independent inspection. A £100 inspection that finds corrosion or a slipping clutch is the cheapest money in the whole process.

Finally, check the running costs of ownership in your area rather than the sticker price. In London that means emissions charges: a non-compliant vehicle costs £12.50 a day to drive anywhere in Greater London, and £18 more inside the central Congestion Charge zone on a chargeable day. Run the plate through our ULEZ checker before you buy, not after. Fuel is the other recurring line — London petrol prices shows what a tank actually costs near you.

Valetly is a mobile car cleaning service in London — a vetted, insured valet comes to the address where your car is parked, at a fixed price from £75. We build these free tools because our customers keep asking the same admin questions, and because the moments that trigger them overlap with ours: buying a car, selling one, or getting one ready for a test.

Selling is the clearest overlap. Presentation moves the number on a private sale more than almost any other cheap intervention, and a car with a clean cabin and clean paint photographs better on a listing. The same applies before a valuation or a part-exchange appraisal, which is why our longer appointments get booked heavily by people about to sell.

No claims about what that is worth in pounds — we do not have data we can stand behind, so we will not invent it. What we can state: prices are fixed and published, every valet is identity-checked and carries at least £1m public liability insurance, every job is documented with before-and-after photos, and Valetly is registered in England and Wales under company number 17255496.