What was claimed
This police car’s MOT certificate is overdue.
Our verdict
That’s what the government’s checking service says. It also says that police cars are exempt from the MOT.
Police cars are exempt from having an MOT
23 February 2022
A widely shared Facebook post contains a screenshot showing that a police car’s MOT certificate is “overdue”.
This is an accurate reflection of what you’ll see, at the time of writing, if you search for the car’s registration number on the government’s MOT checking service.
It does not mean that the car is in breach of the rules, however, because police vehicles are exempt from MOT.
The screenshot contains a note saying “This vehicle may be MOT exempt” with a link to MOT exemption guidance. This guidance gives a list of exempt vehicle categories, which includes a “vehicle provided for police purposes and maintained in an approved workshop”.
We have written about similar posts twice before.
Photo by Ashley Harkness on Unsplash
We deserve better than bad information.
After we published this fact check, we contacted the DVSA to suggest they make it clearer on their website that police vehicles are exempt from MOT.
The DVSA did not send us a substantive response.
It’s not good enough.
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This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as missing context because police cars don’t need MOT certificates.